Bloggasm

In a column published in InformationWeek, blogger/journalist/sf novelist Cory Doctorow argues that as Facebook becomes more popular, it becomes much more useless. The very ubiquity of it devalues the power of social networking.

“For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there’s a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy,” he writes, “or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I’d cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, ‘Am I your friend?’ yes or no, this instant, please.”

Doctorow notes that as social networks become more popular, another one springs up for new users to flock to. First there was friendster, and then the users migrated to Myspace, and now they’re leaving Myspace in droves to sign up for Facebook. If his argument is to be believed, then at some point, Facebook will become too crowded — standing room only — and we will need to move on to some other outlet in order for our social networking to become more efficient.

It was only a few hours after I finished reading the column that I realized how true his argument was.

I logged into my email account and was dismayed to see that I had an email from Facebook telling me I had been invited to an “event.” The event was a production put on by a gay and lesbian group at the university from which I graduated in 2006. The person who sent me the invitation (she shall remain nameless) was a friend of a former roommate of mine. She and I had exchanged small talk at a few parties, and at some point one of us had friended the other. But I wouldn’t consider her a “friend” in the real world, and I certainly haven’t communicated with her since I’ve stopped living with that former roommate.

This hasn’t stopped her from spamming me on multiple occasions with invitations to events, usually put on by the before-mentioned gay and lesbian group. It’s very obvious that she merely sends the same invitation to every person on her friendslist. At first, I reacted to these invitations with indifference, clicking on the “not attending” button and then moving on with my life. By about the third time, I began to get annoyed — mainly because Facebook, in its quest to suck in page views, makes you log in to the site just to reject an invitation (it’s like you’re getting double-spammed–once in email, then once in Facebook).

By the time I logged in today, that annoyance had turned into outright anger. “Who the hell does she think she is?” I thought. “Does she have no respect for the people who were nice enough to have friended her? Is she so egotistical that she feels that she has the privilege of spamming every Dick and Jane she knows?”

It was at this point that I realized that this person really had no social value to me at all — in fact she had a negative social value. In this particular instance, social networking was a detriment; a “friend” had betrayed my trust and stepped over the line.

With this realization, I did what I have rarely done before: I removed her from my friendslist.

She will not be the last. I feel like I’ve somehow broken the floodgates. And there’s this other guy I had “friended” in college who I only knew because I had seen him at a few parties and we happened to share a class. Though I no longer live in my college town, I still get regular invites to parties he and his roommates (as a side note, why the hell hasn’t he graduated?) are throwing. With this newfound freedom on my part, he’ll be promptly deleted from my list the next time I find a piece of spam from him in my inbox.

When will this mass deletion stop? With the introduction of facebook apps, this may only be the beginning. How many times do I need to get superpoked before you’re in the deletion bin? There’s only one way to find out.

I’ll end this post with an anecdote: During my senior year in college, I met several freshman who said they had over 100 facebook friends from the university before their first day of school. That’s right, these incoming freshman would go on facebook and maniacally friend every halfway-attractive person, accumulating a mass of useless social networks that would merely cloud their newsfeeds.

Tell me: If you’ve friended 500 people you’ve never met, never corresponded with, or never intend to talk to, then what does that tell you about your real-life, face-to-face social networking?

It tells me that you’re about as shallow as they come.

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2. How to use Facebook as a marketing tool

In terms of media coverage, social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook and video sites like Youtube get all the press. But according to research and analysis company Parks Associates, online gaming is growing at a much quicker rate.

This is pretty impressive, Myspace has managed to remove nearly 30,000 registered sex offenders from the website. I’m not quite sure, however, what keeps them from just creating new profiles under different names.

I found it humorous in the above-linked article how the writer tries to tie sex offenders to the rise of online pornography:

The MySpace sex offenders figure was released as pornography is flooding the American culture. According to comScore Media Metrix, more than a third of the U.S. Internet audience visited sites that fit into the online “adult” category. And 44 percent of males ages 18-34 say viewing pornographic material is morally acceptable, a 2006 Morality in Media study found.

There has been much debate lately about whether all the new applications rolling out every day for Facebook are just cluttering up space. But All Facebook talks about how to use Facebook applications to drive traffic to your site.

Up until relatively recently, the best way to measure a blogger’s online influence/power was to count the number of inbound links from other blogs. But because of the rise of different kinds of social media, it’s no longer so simple. Most bloggers don’t just blog, they write on online message boards, they use facebook, myspace, twitter. They upload pictures on flickr, etc… Given all these other platforms, then a person can have a much more influential presence.

For instance, did you know that I have a livejournal account? Did you know that I have a facebook? How about my myspace profile? This doesn’t even count the comment fields of other blogs I opine in, the message boards I frequent, my photobucket uploads. Or the fact that I’m a newspaper journalist by day.

So anyway, Sixty Second View has come up with a metric that can measure a blogger’s influence much more accurately by taking all these factors into account. Check it out.

UPDATE: You know what? I just realized something. The metrics don’t take into account friends and buddies on instant messenger accounts. Or email contacts. How many times a day do you follow news links in emails or IMs? So, given that, let me mention that my google talk sn is SimonOwens@gmail.com and my AIM sn is nomissnewo

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5. The Google-fication of Facebook

1. I always had this hope that the internet age would make the population more informed. Because of Google and Wikipedia, people would stumble upon all kinds of information unintentionally when searching for celebrity photos. Unfortunately, a new survey shows that people know even less about current events than they did before the internet became popular.

2. Before I read this article by Clive Thompson, I didn’t really understand the point of Twitter. But he actually makes sense in his argument for why it’s a good thing. Maybe it’s not just for hipster narcissists after all.

3. After Facebook opened the floodgates, its original user base became horrified and now they’re restricting access to their profiles.

There has been speculation recently that a study showing that Facebook pageviews actually declined in the past month (even though unique visitors have increased) somehow shows that Facebook won’t be able to overtake Myspace. In reality, the very fact that there were fewer pageviews is evidence that Facebook is better than Myspace.

That’s because Facebook is much more efficient. For every basic action, whether it’s checking someone’s profile or logging out of your account, it normally takes two different pages at Mypace for every page view at Facebook. For instance, if you log out of your account at Myspace, it takes you to an advertisement where you have to click “return to site” if you want to log in again. There’s two page views while for Facebook you only have one page view for the same exact action.

Facebook also has a convenient news feed so you don’t have to visit every individual friend profile to keep up with what’s going on in a person’s life. They have far fewer error messages as well. Plus they load more quickly and you don’t have to keep clicking “refresh” every five seconds to try to boot the page into submission.

The rise of unique visitors should be more indicative of success, and in that arena, Facebook is doing well.

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