Fri 20 Jul 2007

Is Facebook Useful?

A few weeks ago, after a bit of pestering from a couple of friends, I succumbed to peer pressure and signed up for Facebook. I keep hearing about how great these new social sites are meant to be, but nothing has hit me over the head with their Wow! factor yet.

So, a few thoughts after trying it out for a while. It's not too bad and I'll stay signed up and current, I suspect. For me, it's an interesting intersection of two, previously fairly disjoint, parts of life: the IT portion and the "everything else" bit. Most of my online presence is fairly invisible to the latter group, since I hang out in reasonably technical circles. Turns out a lot of non-IT friends are already on facebook, particularly the younger ones who are right into the school/university social stuff. That should make it easier for me to keep up to date with what they're doing (and vice-versa).

Being able to pull information in from other sources (a.k.a. Facebook applications) seems like a mixed bag. Setting aside the various toys that look like they'll have fad life-cycles, it's handy that I can display my Flickr photos without a lot of effort (although it did take a while to find an app that had a nice combination of display and ease-of-use). Somehow — and this is a slightly tricky problem — it would be nice if photos pulled from elsewhere could be labelled just as directly imported photos are. The tagging of people in photos and inter-connectedness feature seems nice. It could be done as an overlay that checks the existing image against a hash so that they don't overlay the details onto a changed image.

The whole relatively carefree way in which people label themselves and others in photos leads to another point, though: the whole place really is a stalker's paradise. Most profile information seems reasonably well protected by default — you can't view it without having been befriended. However, photos provide a leaky source of names and images. Maybe I'm overreacting (having been a casual teacher in a couple of all-girls schools in the past, this stuff was well highlighted by school regulations and local laws), but is there a whole generation or half-generation growing up without sufficient "stranger danger" sanity checks in their head?

It looks like the intention (of the Facebook owners) is that Facebook somehow becomes the centre of the social sphere for somebody and everybody views information through the Facebook lens. I can't see that working for me, at least. Trying to pack that much information into a single browser screen and a paned layout leads to a mess. Still, I will be making bits of information available through my Facebook page for others' benefit, since some people do seem to live there, from the frequency of updates. Can't throw stones too much, though, I live in my feed reader sometimes and on mailing lists at other times.

Syndication feeds are only used sporadically throughout the site. They appear in a lot of places, but are conspicuously absent in others. Might be work in progress, might be oversight, might be shallow, woolly thinking. Hard to say.

Trying to determine the current status of various things is a varying experience, too. I requested an addition of my high school a couple of days ago. There's no tracking ticket number supplied, no feedback; the request has just gone into the ether and either it's taking longer than they predicted, or it's been declined. Similarly, sometimes Facebook tells me I have a friend-request pending with somebody and sometimes it seems to forget (or I do). I thought maybe it dropped back to "add as friend" if the person rejected you the first time around, but that doesn't seem to be the case — one person I could add as a new friend accepted a weeks old invite. I have a bad memory for relatively unimportant things and I could have expected some kind of "you have requests pending to these people" list to be available somewhere. Not sure how ignores/rejections should be handled, though. Do they also have a "you have been found to be unworthy" list? Or just drop back to where you can try again (which is the current behaviour)? Social interactions, particularly disagreements about status, are tricky, so I suspect this is actually a hard question.

Conclusion: I can see why it's a hit with many people, particularly school- and company-based social circles. The cross-pollination between my tech and non-tech (but not Internet-ignorant) social circles is an unexpected surprise and makes it worth it for me (useful, in other words). Seems more useful than other social networks I've dabbled in (e.g. LinkedIn).

Topics: life, thinking, technology/web