Otherwise titled: “An incredibly long post on how Mark Zuckerberg’s bad decisions led to my Facebook fatigue and could possibly lead to the implosion of his admired application.”
Over the past twelve days since I deactivated my Facebook account, I have had dozens of emails and SMS messages asking me why I left the service so abruptly. To most of those inquiries, I say that I am suffering from Facebook fatigue.
Upon closer inspection, I’ve realized that there are two facets to my fatigue: one is similar to Jason Calacanis’ reasons for claiming Facebook bankruptcy, and the other is because is perhaps reflective of a general sense of social network fatigue that I am feeling.
Facebook Bankruptcy
My first reason for deactivating Facebook originates from the day they introduced the developer platform for the site. Since then, I have been inundated by requests (sometimes over 200 a day) from some of my 2000 friends on the site for various pointless applications that I have no interest in and provide no utility to me at all. To quote Jason Calacanis:
Yes, I love Zombies, but no I don’t want to be turned into one. Yes, I like fortune cookies, but no I don’t want a virtual one. Yes, I’d love to play Texas Holdem for a couple of hours - but not online.
Someone once gave me a Facebook “gift”, an icon of a cup of coffee that she purchased off the site for $1, claiming that she knew I was a java-holic and she thought I’d appreciate the cup of joe. While I was thankful for the sentiment, I did remind her that for an additional forty cents she could have bought me a real cup of coffee from Starbucks and we could have had some meaningful meatspace discussion.
I’ll agree that part of this is my fault for having too many contacts on the site, and especially for having too many contacts that aren’t savvy enough to realize that most of these silly applications are a huge waste of my time. That being said, I don’t have the time to deal with requests I don’t care about from people I barely speak to anymore. And when I’m spending more time declining requests than I am doing more productive things on the site, then you know I’m in over my head. It’s like email all over again.
Social Network Fatigue
I’ve been spending less time on Flickr, Last.fm, Upcoming, and many other social networking applications these days. Instead, I’ve been spending more time with applications like Twitter and Dopplr. I’ve realized that the reason I’ve been withdrawing from some social networks and not others is because many applications do not offer enough of a return for the time I spend with them.
Return on investment is incredibly important in all facets of life, so why not in social networking applications? I still do get some use from the recommendation engines in things like Upcoming and Last.fm, and while I do use CC images from Flickr in my projects, so they’re worth keeping around for a bit. After all, I can repurpose the content I put on those sites into my various other properties on the web.
Facebook, however, gives me no return at all. There is no incentive to post notes, items, photos, and events on Facebook because all the content I do post on the site is closed within the site and can not be reused elsewhere on the web. Essentially, Facebook is forcing me to log on to their site to see my own content.
I wrote about this phenomenon recently as a comment on a blog post by Pema Hegan where he said that Facebook scores high points in openness. I humbly disagreed:
Pema, those are some good thoughts, and while I agree completely with your score you give Facebook on security and reliability (well, maybe I might give their reliability a score slightly lower than six), I would give Facebook the complete opposite of “top marks” when it comes to openness. In fact, I would argue that the Facebook is essentially the complete antithesis of the concept of openness on the web.
Right now, Facebook is forcing me to log into a closed platform, a closed area of the web, in order to access content that is essentially my own to reuse. There is no way for me to repurpose anything I do on Facebook into any other part of my life, web-related or not. A few examples:
There is no way for me to export my Facebook events to my iCal or my Google Calendar. There is no way for me to export basic information from my contacts into my address book as vCards or even as a .csv file. My photos, my notes, and my posted items are all limited to being viewed on Facebook alone and are not easily repurposed to my blog or website. (I know there are ways to do all these things, but they require special hacks that are not inherent to the Facebook structure.) The worst part about all this is not only that Facebook doesn’t allow for repurposing and sharing outside its site, but that they actually vehemently oppose (and sometimes threaten with legal action) programs and applications that do facilitate an open exchange, ensuring that their environment remains closed to the outside world.
While you state that the developers platform has shown openness on Facebook’s part, I would argue that instead, this has proven Facebook’s determination to remain closed: by forcing developers to program special applications that fit into Facebook’s parameters, Zuckerberg and Co have essentially forced normal web users into becoming Facebook users (to go from an open environment to a closed and limited environment) in order to have access to certain kinds of applications and data.
What would have been better is for Facebook to have adopted standards like microformats, to allow for exportability and repurposing, and to allow general web applications to draw upon Facebook content without forcing a user to be a member: if I want to play Scrabble with my friends on Facebook, I should be able to do it even if I’m not a Facebook member - make it a web app, but let people access it through the channels they desire, Facebook or not. I’m not saying the people behind Facebook haven’t thought of this, or that these are not things that are in the pipelines; I’m just saying that as it stands right now, Facebook would struggle to score a 1 out of 10 on my scale of openness.
I agree with Jason Kottke when he says that Facebook is reminiscent of an old property that approached the web in the same closed way. Zuckerberg needs to think about that before we all start to, in a few years, remember poking as fad from the past just like free AOL CDs.
This is the second cause of my Facebook fatigue, and one of the major reasons I decided to deactivate my account. The balance of time invested versus utility was just too skewed in one direction.
So, What’s Next?
I’ll inevitably be back to Facebook in the next few weeks: the lack of the ability to export my events to iCal has made me somewhat reliant on the site to find out the location and time of random get-togethers. Which I guess was Zuckerberg’s goal after all - everyone has to come back to his closed platform in the end.
What he doesn’t realize is that (if the service stays the way it is right now) eventually, when enough people get tired of being dependent of Facebook and realize that the openness and pervasiveness of the world wide web is much more conducive to virtual socialization, the little application-that-could is going to die a slow death from the inside out.
Update: If you share some of my thoughts about the frustrations of Facebook being a closed platform, know that we’re not alone. Wired just ran a story on walled-off social networks, and posted a how-to on creating the Facebook experience outside the Facebook platform. Also, microformats.org is hosting a discussion on social network portability on their wiki.