Facebook – face the book

Honestly speaking I am tired of (a) Facebook and (b) Orkut trying to imitate Facebook. Now really, Facebook has been getting on my nerves lately. I’ll be ranting much about facebook’s effort at more than just being a social network.

I had created an Orkut account in mid-2006 and joined Facebook a few months later. Facebook to me appeared at the time as a site that had little of importance for Indians while Orkut was a very open platform where everyone could see everything about every member of the community. Was that good? In a way yes, because everything about the people signing up with Orkut was available to be seen publicly. However, when people felt the need to hide some bits of information about themseleves from the social network they started removing it from their profiles. Some went and took the extreme steps of deleting their Orkut profile and recreating their profiles altogether. I’ve been tempted to do that many times but haven’t done so far.

Facebook was different in that sense. Since there was little appeal in it for Indians in its early days it didn’t bother me much. It was only when I found some non-Indian friends that I slowly became more active there. But by then, I had learnt the lesson of not revealing everything about yourself on a social network and hence made my facebook profile hidden from everyone. Now I had control over who I chose to befriend there.

As Facebook became more popular in India more and more Indians joined it. Most of my Orkut friends too now have a Facebook account now. The problem I see with this is that the activities of my friends overlap on both social networks. They add the same apps on Orkut and Facebook, do the same thing, add the same photographs on their profiles and just about try to imitate everything on both social networks. This makes the networks boring for me.

The other more important problem I see is the way Facebook tells me to invite new friends and gives me ‘friend suggestions’ of people who I do not know. (Lately even Orkut has started doing that). Somebody should ask Facebook admins why should I add people I do not know as my friend? Lets face it, I am more of a conservative kind of guy on the internet, and I value my privacy. I will NOT send a friend request to people I have not met in person. So why should I be shown friend suggestions of people I do not know? And even worse, there are people I know who I do not want to have in my social network. Yet, Facebook shows me their friend suggestion which inevitably turns annoying.

How does Facebook show friend suggestions? For a start, according to the permission levels set by Facebook users, Facebook reveals the entire friend lists of people in my list. To an extent this is a good way of suggesting new friends. Facebook also encourages us to upload our entire address book from our email account. They then save the address list and start suggesting contacts from there. This is annoying. Often I find that there are people in my address book who I have not emailed in months or years and yet I find their friend suggestion pop up on Facebook. To overcome this problem I changed the email address associated with my Facebook account by creating a new email and never uploading it’s address book to Facebook. The result – I now only get suggestions for joining groups or pages on Facebook.

And well, Orkut has always played catch-up to Facebook and they too have started doing this annoying thing now. Pretty soon I shall change my email address from there too.

The other annoying thing about Facebook are its apps. Of course I am aware of the privacy issues associated with using Facebook apps but what annoys me more are the feeds they send out to me everyday. There is this app called Farmville or something which is being played apparently by every second person in my friend list. Needless to say it was sending update feeds to my homepage every few minutes. And I even saw people commenting on it’s update feeds. I tolerated it for some days but blew my top last week when I noticed that there were very few other updates from my friends except from those who were playing Farmville.  I had no choice but to block this app and a couple of friends who chose to play and use apps similar to it.

What is a social network? To me it is just a method to remain in touch with all my buddies and see what they are up to in their life. Maybe I am from the old school but social networking stops for me there. I do not want to know what is my friend’s highest score in a racing car app. I do not want to know the result of stupid Facebook quizzes like ‘How awesome are you?‘ or ‘Who is your latest crush?‘ I am just 28 but it does sound like I am reallllllly old school when I say that you are genuinely stupid to take a quiz like ‘What is your height?‘ on Facebook.

And seriously how do people take time out of their work to use these apps on Facebook? Is it really so addictive? This gentleman in my list uses Facebook from both web and mobile, sometimes even updating that he is driving and stuck in a traffic jam somewhere in Mumbai. I want to slap him on his head and say ‘dude, you need to get a life!‘

Recently I joined Twitter. The updates can be found in the left sidebar of this blog. I find it a lot less intrusive and easier to manage. The concept is simple – that you follow another person, while others may follow you and you post SMS-text like tweets on your page in less than 140 characters. Simple and easy, it has ways of searching the current trends of tweets. I like it because I get to know what’s on the mind of people I am following. Plus of course it gives us the opportunity of following celebrities and interacting with world leaders, including Prez Barack Obama.

In the same way I’ve just joined Tumblr, but am yet to explore it.

Some say that social networking is just a passing fad. I don’t think so. Like I said before, for me social networks are just a way to remain in touch with my buddies from around the world. And I will carry on doing it till these networks close down. I don’t need anything else from them, just a way to contact my friends. PERIOD.

PS: Remind me not to add my family members into my existing social network. It can be disastrous.