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Facebook – the “Hotel California” of Social Networks
This is long and ranty. I haven’t done long and ranty for a while. Take it or leave it.
It was one of those “blinding light” moments – the moment when you finally turn to acknowledge the feeling that’s been kicking around for many months and realise “oh yeah!”
I finally discovered that I really hate Facebook.
It’s not like I’m the first – the most famous incidence being Jason Calcanis’s decision to declare “Facebook Bankruptcy” back in July, an event which trickled by without actively triggering my own epiphany. My realisation was prompted by a conversation with someone who recently heard a talk by a Facebook developer. The salient point, from the horse’s mouth, was that Facebook believe that their application is compellingly relevant to its users “because everyone you add on Facebook is someone you want to hear from.”
Evidently no-one on Facebook staff is being bombarded with the constant “Zombie requests”, Quiz requests, “rate your movies” requests and other effluvia which, post-trumpeted-API-launch, have become a veritable Face-tsunami. Furthermore, no-one at Facebook seems to know anything about psychology, social networks or the interaction between the two.
There are two major problems with the “all your Facebook friends are relevant to you” hypothesis.
Firstly, social networks tend to morph under the weight of human psychology into a Pokemon-like popularity contest – “gotta catch ‘em all” – you add everyone you’ve ever so much as exchanged glances with, and anyone with less than 50 friends looks like a lonely loser.
Secondly, it’s very hard to deny friend requests since it’s obvious that you’ve done so and it’s a pretty blunt snub. Even if you don’t care much about the latest “addee” in your stream, few people want to be seen by their former schoolfriends as an unfriendly snob, and even fewer people want to upset a professional contact who may be a key ally at some point in the future…
…which is why everyone’s contact list balloons over time – for many months I had only 8 contacts on Facebook; by the time of last night’s revelation, that had grown to 125. There are only three possible answers to this -
- Bite the bullet, and reconcile yourself to the idea of coming across as an asshole.
- Add people until your “Feed” looks like a cross between Toys’R'Us and a warzone.
- Get the hell out of Dodge (my current preferred solution).
I care in some way about every single one of the people I added on Facebook, but I don’t want to answer their movie quizzes, become their “zombie victim” or engage in an online “food fight” with them. And here’s the ultimate kicker – for the people I really care about, I have (or should have) far more direct contact with them – phone calls, personal emails, real-life meetings; all of which render the fairly cursory, sterile experience of a Facebook exchange irrelevant. And if anyone else wants to get hold of me, it’s not hard to find me – search engines have a pretty good idea of where I am, for one thing.
We’ve forgotten something in the Great Web 2.0 Social Circlejerk, and that is: you can only really have a small number of true friends, because friendship takes time – meeting, communicating, supporting… there’s nothing lonelier than having 200 “friends”, and realising that you couldn’t really turn to a single one of them if the bottom fell out of your world tomorrow. I’m reminded here of a line from Mary Schmich’s “Wear Sunscreen” (as immortalised in the incredibly cheesy Baz Luhrman track)…
Understand that friends come and go, but for the precious few you
should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and
lifestyle because the older you get, the more you need the people you
knew when you were young.
Many people will probably disagree at this point, which is just fine, although as the days whizz by I find myself hearing “Facebook is annoying” from more and more people. But here’s the real kicker about Facebook, and the inspiration for the title of this post…
You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave…
I logged on this morning, resolving to kick Facebook into touch, and looking for a “delete my profile” button. Only there isn’t one. Instead, you can “deactivate” your profile.
I decided to do that, and went through the form which asks about your reason for leaving and then pops up patronising DHTML prompts which attempt to counter that reason. Then I came to the checkbox at the bottom of the form – “Opt out of Facebook emails”. I’ll need to paraphrase here as I no longer have Facebook access, but it was explained along these lines:
Your friends will still be able to tag photos of you, and invite you to groups and events. Check this box if you’d like to opt out of notifications of these events.
Huh. So if I leave Facebook, stuff can still happen on my profile, even though I’m no longer there? That feels… wrong. I completed the deactivation, but was curious… if I reactivated my profile, what would happen?
Reactivating is a case of logging in, and then clicking on a link they email to you.
Click… and “bam!”, there was my profile, complete with all the contacts, groups and “zombie invite” clutter there’d been before. Clearly, truly quitting Facebook takes work. Lots of work.
To opt out of any friend-related activity, it seems that you need to actually delete those friendships. Three clicks per delete – the “delete” link, an “Are you sure?”/”OK” exchange, and another “OK” to dimiss confirmation. 375 mouse-clicks to drop those 125 nodes on my “social graph”… plus more to actually dismiss the zombie crap, leave groups and generally close things down. Just the thought of it gives my brain RSI.
This is, plainly, an unforgivably shitty user experience. I don’t expect any service to insist that once I have an account, I will always have an account – not my bank, not an online retailer, and certainly not something as inessential and inconsequential as a social network.
It also belies a stunning level of insecurity. “Lock-in” is the last refuge of the weak – a tactic used by people convinced that their service is so awful that everyone will up and walk away if they don’t force them to stay. Prisons have locked gates for a reason; Facebook (if they’re as truly confident about the “essential” nature of their service as they say in public) should not.
I’m really interested as to how this plays out in the long run. Facebook has more hype than you can shake a stick at and a strongly-rumored big queue of Big Money at the door. Furthermore, as Google’s stock price tops out and its “Don’t be Evil; have a free gourmet lunch; take 20% for a personal project” culture dissipates under the inevitable strains of growth, Facebook is becoming the Hot New Place for smart developers to pitch tent and get to work.
They may yet do something truly revolutionary, or tweak the model so it actually appeals to grumpy old bastards like me. If I were them, I’d lock the API down a lot more and insist on reviewing apps before they’re allowed onto the site – rather like console manufacturers do with games. Cut the deluge of useless apps, and concentrate on the ones which actually add value.
Facebook, as it is, is just unbearable in a way that even MySpace (for all its unreliability and layout hideousness) just can’t muster. Even though it was a chore to quit it, I feel better already.
October 26th, 2007 at 1:11 pm
Network churn (Friendster to MySpace to Facebook to ???) is the “inbox zero” of social websites. As your group expands, you move to new territory instead of culling it.
October 26th, 2007 at 2:45 pm
Yes, absolutely, and that leaves me with 2 thoughts…
(1) This must be terrifying for anyone working on a social network who’s really thought about it, because it pretty much guarantees that, at some point, your rate-of-leavers is going to outstrip your rate-of-joiners…
(2) How would you actually go about mitigating that? I’ve been thinking about that quite a lot since I wrote the above rant, and I’ve been toying in my head with the idea of a “self-limiting social network”. It would be incredibly interesting if Facebook had a “cull” feature – “nuke all the contacts I haven’t interacted with in the past x days”. Or, even more extreme, a network which regularly drops your contact list to the 30(?) or so with whom you have the most in common, or the most contact with.
It would destroy the whole “collect all the friends” aspect which plagues most social sites, but at what cost to the network itself; and at what cost to the few who are truly gregarious and prolific enough to maintain a higher number of contacts?
No answers really, just pontificating… for now, at least
October 26th, 2007 at 3:34 pm
+2 for the use of effluvia in this post.
Can you clarify – did you delete all your contacts before deactivating or not? How do people respond?
I think a healthy amount of artificial scarcity is the thing. Something like BumpList takes this to extremes. You have to keep playing to play. Or perhaps happiness is a social network for one.
The worst aspect of Facebook for me is the way your profile accretes background information about you like some twisted personal DLA engine, there are no limits (except the 5000 contacts limit) to the amount of information they’re interested in gathering about you. I try to explain why this bothers me and always get cornered into looking like a conspiratorial nutjob, but I honestly think their collection of how you know people and where you lived is *only* of use to national intelligence agencies (and Hallmark).
No Exit // “Hell is other people”
October 26th, 2007 at 3:46 pm
How to mitigate it: one way is to do what you-all at Flickr are up to, which is making the social network specific around some task or shared interest, e.g. photos, travel, music, etc. – churn is natural and expected in such communities. People become interested in photography, knitting, or detroit techno, hang around for a bit soaking it up, and eventually most of them drift away.
Churn as a problem only seems to crop up in the omnibus networks like Facebook that want to be your always-and-forever, like buddies who want 100% of your time and eventually wind up getting none.
+100 for the creepy background info. I was recently wished a happy birthday by someone who had seen my Facebook profile, and even the return of that simple piece of information I had slipped out gave me the heebie-jeebies.
October 26th, 2007 at 5:08 pm
Tom,
I did indeed delete each contact before deactivating (I’d also announced my intention to deactivate in my “status” the night before). I had one friend who was sad to see me go from Facebook, mainly because we’re mutually crap at meeting in real life, but I’ve had no other reactions so far.
As to the data collection, I think you’re missing a huge segment who are interested in that data (or, at least, some kind of distilled version of it) – marketers and advertisers.
Honestly, I think Facebook is way more interested in assisting those folks than they are in the intelligence agencies.
If 5 of your friends respond to a particular campaign… it’s more likely that you’re also the kind of person it’ll work for. If they know someone’s birthday, Amazon can pop up and spam them all with “buy your mate a present” links when the time rolls round…
I think the shine is still enough on Facebook that most people aren’t reacting adversely to the data collection, and therefore “the more, the better” – information that doesn’t turn out to be useful can be discarded… eventually; data that isn’t discarded can be played with in new and ever-more-marketable ways…
…personally, I still find that a little creepy.
October 26th, 2007 at 5:29 pm
Michal,
I think you’re spot-on with the “purpose vs. omnibus” observation.
The only problem I have with purpose-driven social networks is the fact that each one requires set-up effort – finding out who else is there, encouraging old cronies to join, adding them as friends, getting into using the site…
It would be lovely if some proper standards could emerge to make that stuff easier.
I know there are plenty of sites out there who are trying to do this, but I can’t quite bring myself to trust services whose entire business model is centered around knowing who I know, especially not when they usually require my login credentials to mine that data.
Brad’s “open social graph” ideas are the best standardisation attempt I’ve seen so far – I have a few small worries (mainly based around people in dot-com-blue shirts getting way too excited about “the possibilities” of OSG), but I’m looking forward to seeing how it progresses.
October 26th, 2007 at 6:29 pm
Ha, it’s funny to come across this. Sorry Michal, I just thought it was cool that we had the same birthday; you had left a couple of good comments on my blog and it seemed like a good way to say ‘hello’, didn’t mean to bug you out!
[disclaimer: I am not a wacko]
It does raise a lot of interesting questions, though, right? Personal/professional boundaries and linkages … and this is the second time this week I’ve read about the hell that is attempting to quit facebook: another online friend(?) who joined the site for (sociology/technology) reasearch purposes tried and failed to pull the plug: So, you want to delete your Facebook profile… (Part 1)
October 26th, 2007 at 11:51 pm
I’m not overly concerned about social graph standardization. I am an active user of a few social sites, and there’s not a lot of overlap among the different users I’m connected to on each. Ffffound! is hyperparticular about designed images, Twitter is all about people I’m actually friends with, WeEndure is for tracking my bike mileage and rising through the ranks of the MeFi group cycling challenge, and that’s pretty much it.
765, that’s funny – I didn’t mean you, but thanks! The birthday thing strangely came up in a totally other conversation. I’ll still read your site and f-f-f-find your images.
I did end up deleting my FB account today, though I put none of the care into it that you did, hitherto. I found that they don’t want you to leave, though, and have an answer for just about any reason you might care to give for “deactivating” (not “deleting”) your account: http://mike.teczno.com/notes/facebook-deactivation.html
October 27th, 2007 at 3:23 pm
I’m absolutely aware of the value of that information to marketers. I’m just increasingly reluctant to give information to a site or interact with it in certain ways if it’s doesn’t improve *my* experience of that site. Sure, my interactions on Flickr or LinkedIn or wherever feed into a large dataset which is valuable in and of itself, but much time is spent deriving value from that data that other end users and I can appreciate too. I don’t see that happening on Facebook (yet?) with the super-detailed stuff that they ask for and so I find it creepy.
You say “Honestly, I think Facebook is way more interested in assisting those folks than they are in the intelligence agencies.” – I agree (but I don’t think that marketers are any better than spies, so I’m happy to continue to keep blurring the distinction). What’s more I think Facebook is way more interested in assisting those folks than they are in providing a better experience to their users. That, I hope, will be their downfall.
November 5th, 2007 at 1:53 pm
Simon, Here you are! Just tried to reply to your facebook message and was trying to figure out why it wasn’t working. This blog has made that somewhat clearer. So glad I’ve found you again, what’s your email address? Hope you’re well and life is good, maymay xx
November 14th, 2007 at 12:56 pm
Great convo – the issue is that we dont have the semantic language for the nature of these relationships – just as web pages are not webpages – friends on facebook presupposes an intimacy that may or may not be there. I like serendipity of finding stuff through friends actions – the problem is there is just SO much noise out there – vampires zombies etc. IAs for advertising sutff- the thing is – it just aint gonna work as thye discussed it – replacing network superbowl ad with ALL of my contacts at FB now spamming me with hundreds of mini superbowl ads is just noice and uses and old media model. It you provide me info on a product when I am receptive to buy it and when I am in the market and have gestured interest and then tell me which of my 3 closest friends [based on behavior and interaction] use it – that is HELPFUL.
Make me smarter about me not just noisier! Of course the above scenario means that I still need to provide the FB entity with all this info – which is icky at the moment because they are not clear who is their primary customer – me or the advertiser.
How would you guys have felt if they had launched their intentions to do this to all their members first and then given u s the ability to turn it OFF from the get go till [or if] they proved value?
November 14th, 2007 at 12:58 pm
and – ugh lousy typos in above comment…;)
November 14th, 2007 at 1:34 pm
deb, what I find interesting here is that you’re basically describing the advertising “model” which product review sites (including local listings like Yahoo! Local or Yelp) and comparison shopping sites have tried to embrace, but they have an opposite problem…
…usually, the set of reviews is from people I don’t know, whose opinions I can’t therefore trust, and possibly don’t care about. At best, 100 bad reviews for a product/establishment allows me to decide that it’s probably bad, but that personal connection just doesn’t exist.
If Facebook are smart, they’ll find the middle path between their current “tsunami of irrelevant spam” and applied, specific reviews, and finally build something that’s scalably, personally useful.
I’ve seen little evidence that they “get” this yet, though, and since Madison Avenue seems so damn excited about Facebook’s SocialSpam right now, it’s going to be very hard to turn down the money while the buzz is there, in favour of building a better product.
It can be done… I suspect, sadly, that it won’t (but then, I’m always a Big Cynic who should be taken with a pinch of salt)
January 9th, 2008 at 4:28 am
In the wake of the Scoble Facebook nonsense, I’ve belated found out that Alan Burlinson, a Perl/Sun hacker who you may recall from a YAPC or otherwise, has complained about the inability to delete his account to the upholders of the Data Protection Act, and has even got as far as getting mainstream (well, Channel 4) coverage:
http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/science_technology/facebook%20data%20protection%20row/1060467
ps pls blog moar kthnx
January 9th, 2008 at 4:32 am
I can’t spell Alan Burlison’s name right. Oops.
February 14th, 2008 at 11:21 am
[...] Facebook – the “Hotel California†of Social Networks [hitherto.net] To opt out of any friend-related activity you need to delete those friendships. 375 mouse-clicks to remove 125 nodes on my “social graph”, plus more to dismiss the zombie crap, leave groups and close things down. Just the thought of it gives my brain R (tags: facebook socialsoftware usability socialnetworks) [...]