RSS feedIs Facebook really as essential as it’s made out to be?
My brother thought that my decision to quit Facebook was just me getting caught up in the hype about Quit Facebook Day. This wasn’t actually true: I’d been mulling it over for several months, and just looking for the right time to do so. I announced my intention as a status update on Facebook about nine days ago, and finally pulled the plug on my account on Sunday after I got home from church, a day earlier than I’d intended.
What happened in the end? The silence has been deafening. No-one commented, no-one e-mailed, no-one phoned me up, no-one tried to persuade me that I’d been reading too much Jeff Atwood, no-one questioned my decision. This is not what I expected at all. I’d expected a string of wall posts trying to talk me out of it, people asking me what had happened, discussing among themselves what I was doing, speculation about whether someone had offended me, or whatever. Perhaps a few specially sharpened Bible verses reminding me that Jesus commands us to love one another. Isn’t quitting Facebook tantamount to social suicide? For that reason, I decided merely to deactivate my account rather than delete it outright, so that if things did go that way, I could always return. But after nearly a week, they haven’t.
The only conclusions I could draw from this were that either (a) people don’t really care about me, or (b) people don’t really care about Facebook. The more people I speak to, the more I come to the conclusion that it’s the latter rather than the former. This kind of makes sense. While the majority of my friends have Facebook accounts, a large percentage of them don’t, and of those who do, many of them seem to make very little use of it. Some of them, I just never got round to linking up with on the site, but I’m still friends with them in Real Life.
All in all, I’m far from convinced that Facebook is the “must-have” that the press make it out to be. In fact, it’s probably more of a “nice to have.” We’re told that it has five hundred million “fans” — but if up to forty percent of these “fans” are fake accounts, created by spammers and virus writers to distribute malware, and over fifty percent of the remainder are only occasional users or even dormant accounts, it doesn’t sound quite so impressive.
I’m hoping that the Diaspora project lives up to its promises. It’s a tall order, but done right, a distributed social network, where you install the software and you manage your online relationships, rather than handing them over to commercial interests, could be quite promising. By being distributed in nature, you avoid the pitfalls of a centralised social network which would put you at risk by changing the rules of the game at a whim. If they make it GPL and put it on github, it would be a guarantee against them turning nasty, since if they did, other developers would be able to come along, fork it, and release a version of their own that you could trust. Of course, in order to compete against Facebook, they need to pull out all the stops in terms of usability. After all, if it’s to be successful in that respect, they will need to pitch it first and foremost to not-computer people.
Posted at 08:00 on 4 June 2010.
Feel free to take a look round the site — if I
say anything that 
09:21
Hey James,
I understand your quitting Facebook – it tends to be “read-only” for me these days, as my twitter account updates my facebook status automatically.
The problem with Diaspora is that you will need to install software. I would wager that 98% of facebook users would not do that – especially as almost every other successful social network is available anywhere, anytime, with just a browser and internet connection. As far as I am concerened, this is one of the major reasons why the once-mighty Instant Messaging, tiped to replace email as the defacto method of internet communication, is losing ground fast.
Diaspora appeals to the OSS-minded (geek) and the heavily privacy-minded (fanatic?) but I don’t think that it will appeal to the everyday, social user. And that will be it’s death-knell, because what use is a social network that is geeky and fanatical?
11:21
Most of FB I ignore now, but I do like keeping up with friends photos. I mostly post my status using Twitter and usually from an iPhone. The one thing I like about FB is that replies to updates are all grouped together, great for group communication. Whereas on Twitter someone can reply to something you put up a while ago and you can miss that it’s even a reply. The interesting thing is that we have people in the church here now and others who come on retreat at Lamplugh who’s first point of contact was FB.
10:20
@Sam: I wouldn’t write off Diaspora just yet. There are some tricky problems to be addressed with a project such as this, but I’m sure they will be thinking hard about them, and they will be offering a hosted service for people who don’t have the technical expertise to install their own software. Also, since it’s open source, hopefully other people and organisations, such as churches, football clubs, employers, and so on, will (hopefully) also be able to offer their own hosted versions, which if all goes well should be able to interoperate. Also, the project has received quite a lot of attention: they hoped to raise $10,000 for it and ended up raising $200,000 in the end, as well as offers of practical help from all sorts of people such as lawyers and accountants, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some usability experts in the mix.
I’m sorry to have to say this, but I find your reference to privacy-minded individuals as “fanatics” to be borderline offensive. There are very good reasons — notably, cybercrime — to be concerned about privacy on Facebook: for a couple of examples of level headed discussion about this, see this article by John C Dvorak and this BBC News article. Burglars, for instance, would be most interested to know when you’re going away on holiday — something they can easily find out from your Facebook profile unless you’re very careful about what you post. When Facebook has built up a reputation for being thoroughly reckless with people’s information, and nearly 90% of respondents to a recent survey in the Evening Standard thought they had badly let users down in this respect, and they’re drawing the attention of the regulators (the Canadian authorities are taking them to court; US senators have been asking tough questions, and the European Union has described their actions as “totally unacceptable”), it doesn’t look so fanatical after all.
@Paul: That’s great — I’m glad to hear that you’ve seen some good things out of Facebook, and I’m not advocating that everyone should leave the site as I have done. However, I do believe that people should be made aware of the issues, and given whatever help they need to lock down their profiles to a sensible level (bearing in mind that the defaults that Facebook recommends on their new simplified privacy settings are anything but sensible), and you, as a pastor, would do well to do whatever you can to raise awareness of these issues in your church, especially among your young people and among parents of teenage and pre-teenage children, and perhaps find someone who can help people with the technical aspects if you can.
One other thing I’d ask, not just of you, but of pastors in general, is, please give all the support that you can to those of us who decide to quit Facebook altogether. It’s a fairly major step that a lot of people baulk at simply because they don’t want to be perceived as antisocial, and fear becoming disconnected from their friends, yet our concerns with the site are legitimate and serious: Facebook has overwhelmingly demonstrated that it is not to be trusted with our personal data, and it’s going to be an uphill battle for them to regain that trust. Don’t rely on Facebook to communicate details of church events, for instance, don’t try to pressurise us into changing our minds, and perhaps you may even be in a position to point us in the direction of other like-minded individuals?