::A Geek in Korea::

Way back in the year 2007, I joined this service called “Twitter” at the prompting of a friend in the United States. He wanted to have an method of asynchronous chat/communication with friends now that people live across the globe and have vastly different schedules. We weren’t running into each other on other chat services that use instant messages anymore. Those things require both people to be sitting in front of a computer at the same time. Email is still good, but when you want a conversation between a few people, it’s annoying.

Also, since everyone in college is on Facebook, my friend didn’t want to join that service because he might run into students online. He can protect his Twitter updates, but didn’t want to be bothered knowing about people on Facebook. My friends gradually signed up on Twitter, and it’s rare that I bother to check to see if a friend on an instant messager anymore. I just fire up Tweetdeck and check their updates, comment, and follow anyone new that catches my eye. I really like the brevity and the ease of use with Twitter. If I had the ability to cheaply tweet from my phone, I’d use it all the time. I already use it all the time, but I’d be using it even more. It does one simple thing very well.

I ended up joining Facebook by being strong armed by my friends in Korea. They used to post things through the day, and they wanted to get me in on that. None of those people have a web site or blog of any kind.  I already have established my “voice”, and I use tools to share my opinion such as Twitter and my website.  Facebook was already facing an uphill battle when I joined. I seriously debated the idea of joining that website for weeks. While I was a very early adopter in Twitter, I’m late to the party in Facebook.

My family back in the States also uses Facebook. In fact, I’ve got more relatives than friends on Facebook, and the tone of the entire service is much more a family reunion than a service for communicating my feelings or ideas. Instead of having to fly back to the United States to look at pictures from someone’s latest vacation, I can see them now. I guess that’s pretty cool.

One thing I don’t like about Facebook is that it attempts to do too many things. You can post pictures. You can “Friend” ideas and concepts. You can play games. You can do all sorts of things with a confusing and poorly differentiated interface. I feel bombarded by small things every time I log on Facebook. Things I just don’t need to know or care about, and that’s coming from someone big on Twitter.

I use Facebook for as little as possible because I don’t trust the company behind it. I check it once a day. People that have added me as a friend post pictures of themselves at parties, or doing things around town. I heartily dislike doing that. I’ve got a personal Flickr feed for family members specifically for that. It’s not that I don’t want to see what they are up to, but I’d never, ever do that myself. I distrust the privacy offered by Facebook, as they seem to be waiting to abuse their wealth of personal info for commercial gain. There is far to much information available about the people using Facebook for my comfort. Even at the minimal level of privacy offered, I feel uncomfortable. I have a bare minimum of people on Facebook and I feel bombarded. I can’t imagine if I ever got as many friends as my coworker or brother did. He has hundreds of people following him. How the hell can they deal with all that spam?

I’m sure Flickr and Twitter would sell me out the same if they could, but I can’t imagine they’ll get much value from a 140 character updates and a few of my vacation pictures. I don’t offer any information to Facebook besides my bare essentials. I haven’t gone trying to find people from High School or bother people from my past,  because I haven’t talked to them in years. They are Internet strangers, just like the random people that follow me on Twitter. At least when someone on Twitter updates they post a short 140 character tweet. I don’t have to go seeing all their relationship status updates or know who they are related to.

I guess I don’t “get” Facebook. I think the value of the system is probably determined by the amount you share. If you want to live your life like an open book and let anyone and everyone find and friend you, you’re probably in love with Facebook by now. I don’t post status updates via Facebook. I use an application which pulls stuff from Twitter to dump it on Facebook. I have no interest in Facebook only applications because Facebook doesn’t work on my phone either.

Applications in Facebook end up spamming me with updates and little things lines of text that add up over time. I’d rather not have to deal with anything involved with Facebook’s home screen if possible. The interface in Facebook is confusing to me. I don’t know what differentiates a “Status update” from a “News Update”. I don’t know what a “wall” is, or why people post things to it. I don’t give a damn when someone “Friends” another person unless I know that person, and I don’t want to be alerted when someone else does something that doesn’t involve me.  I haven’t found the “turn off the stupid shit I don’t care about” button on Facebook. Do other people really like to use the web this way? I guess so.

My Facebook dislike officially puts me in the “GET OFF MY LAWN!!” segment of the population very early in my life. My mother is probably more active on that service than I am, and she might have more people as friends than I do. I think the 11 day old infant my friends in Korea added to Facebook has more friends than I do. That just strikes me as wrong. To me Facebook feels like a hollowed out blog with status updates.

I have a blog to share my tone, and I feel Twitter augments my voice. Due to the “Friends first” nature of Facebook, I don’t really feel it serves the same sort of purpose. I guess for people that have no other web presence, it is a “good enough” replacement for a blog. People like the centralized nature of finding people, which is also nice. If you want to see some pictures of people you know somehow, it’s okay. I’m deeply suspicious of the use of the information posted on Facebook, and feel that it creeps uncomfortably into my offline life far too much to give me comfort using it. With a large enough group of people policing the people using that information there could be safeguards in place to prevent abuse, but I feel like posting actual information of Facebook only enables identity theft and endangers my privacy.

Am I off base here? Are there any Facebook defenders that want to comment on why the service is useful to someone that already has a blog? I know people feel as strongly as I do about Twitter being a waste of time, but I’m not convinced Twitter has reached it’s potential, while Facebook seems to be…well, a family reunion in cyber space at the moment.