The Facebook model of human connection/communication is a largely terrible one, if you think about it. Clicking buttons and games and wall posts aren't a reflection of how the real-world model of communication works - and aside from distracting you on a day-to-day basis, the model replaces some of your most important connections with the illusion of intimacy.
I'd much rather call and set up a lunch-date for the people I truly care about than to follow the trickle of updates on their Facebook profiles for a year. Updates are superficial, and splintered, and distracting.
This may, of course, be personal preference, but consider: the Facebook profiles I know tend to become echo chambers at a rate far higher than that of blogs and personal sites. This rarely - if ever - happens in real life.
>Facebook profiles I know tend to become echo chambers at a rate far higher than that of blogs and personal sites
I rarely if ever update my Facebook profile, but I still think it's a fantastic site for networking, finding events, and looking up email addresses. I completely disagree with the article that blogs\personal sites and facebook accounts are substitutable goods in competition with each other. For many users, they are in entirely different product categories.
Yes, but you don't use Facebook to communicate, you use it to facilitate other forms of communication. IMO, even as you praise it your actions recognize how limited it is as a communications medium.
The open web is a network of information while facebook is a network of people. Social is about interaction between people so I disagree that the open web is more social. The open web may be more connected but facebook is more social because the connections are mainly between people. And while facebook is in many ways a closed system it is weaving itself seamlessly into the fabric of the web with the open graph initiative. Search engines may not be able to crawl facebook directly but through it's graph api website developers can access that information.
The open web is a network of information while facebook is a network of people
I disagree. Facebook is nothing more than bundle of services that happen to be conveniently integrated and laced together by the friends graph. Facebook will shatter like all previous monoliths have once we've figured out how to distribute said graph in a sensible way.
To clarify I'll repeat what I've said elsewhere before (which is mostly in line with the article):
I consider facebook a temporary stepstone in internet evolution. The early commercial internet was dominated by closed ecosystems called AOL and compuserve. A bit later we had portals like lycos and yahoo. Today it's google and facebook.
The pattern seems obvious, the systems become more open and distributed at each step.
But wait, Facebook looks more like a step back, closer to AOL rather than the other direction, you say?
I'd argue that this is also how internet evolution works; one-step-back, two-steps-forward.
New concepts seem to first emerge in the form of walled gardens. The first person to integrate and evolve a new concept (such as the friends graph, or twitter) will usually do so inside a closed test tube, simply because that's the most natural way to go (cf. prototyping).
Then, when the concepts mature to a point of massive popularity the test tube will inevitably begin to crackle and smaller, "do-one-thing-and-do-it-well" style services start to form in the puddles around the monolith.
If you want to see the future internet then you should look less at facebook and more at the puddle surrounding it.
Perhaps the open web is more social in the same way going to a party where you meet new people is more social than just hanging out with the same people all the time.
>Susan Herring, professor of information science at Indiana University, sees it this way: “What the statistics point to is a rise in Facebook, a decline in blogging, and before that, a decline in personal Web pages. The trend is clear, she said — Facebook is displacing these other forms of online publication.["]
Can anyone verify this claim? Are active blogs decreasing or is the growth rate of new blogs just slowing?
If it's just a slump in the creation rate of new blogs, perhaps it's because the proliferation of blogging tools a few years ago made it much easier for people to start blogging, and it hasn't been getting easier because it's aready really easy?
If anything, I would predict the viral nature of Facebook gets new types of people accusttomed to sharing information online, and would lead to more blogs by increasing the number of would be bloggers to offset any decrease it might cause by providing its own sharing platform.
The Facebook model of human connection/communication is a largely terrible one, if you think about it. Clicking buttons and games and wall posts aren't a reflection of how the real-world model of communication works - and aside from distracting you on a day-to-day basis, the model replaces some of your most important connections with the illusion of intimacy.
I'd much rather call and set up a lunch-date for the people I truly care about than to follow the trickle of updates on their Facebook profiles for a year. Updates are superficial, and splintered, and distracting.
This may, of course, be personal preference, but consider: the Facebook profiles I know tend to become echo chambers at a rate far higher than that of blogs and personal sites. This rarely - if ever - happens in real life.