Back in 1988 before the Web arrived we used to play a lot of image based games around the internet, passing encoded images back and forth and basically working hard to make some sense of this dark network where no-one could see anyone else.
From that point on for me the internet and the web have been a rich and strange playground where each new person, each new application, each new network, added something unknowable to the sum total of where we worked and played.
Facebook doesn’t really do any of that. It’s a nice tidy ‘burb where everyone has more or less the same house, same garden, same car, same attitude.
Sure, we can all add friends and join networks and add applications, but it’s always clear that there is no curtain behind which strange things might lurk. Facebook is the uber controlled environment – useful and wanted by many, but not pregnant with potentials.

Facebook is experiencing a huge wave of migration. This is held up as proof of the genius of Zuckerberg, and indeed in many ways they have played a blinder.
From a closed College based network, they have taken a gamble to open up to anyone and everyone and seen it pay off bigtime. The viral nature of Facebook is supreme, with member get member raised to a new artform. I’ve read dozens of articles about how all of someone’s friends have arrived in Facebook in the very recent past, usually in a great splurge of arrivals as a single outrider reports back to the group that, yup, it looks safe in here and there are lush pastures for the cattle.
Then everyone else takes up residence, and as they overlap with other social groups, the process repeats itself. There is something engaging and exciting about arriving in an easy to understand social network, with tools to explore and people to Poke (ooh, the underlying sexual thrill of it all, it reminds me of my first disco, I didn’t know what that was all about either, but by God it turned me on).
Face it, when someone invites you to join Facebook and be their friend, its a cheap thrill to sign up and be that friend.

I’m used to some level of sophistication in my toolset. I don’t mind using your online tools, after all, it’s your community. But ffs, all I can do in my Groups is write on the wall? And then you can write on the same wall back to me. I can upload photos? Every time someone does something, I get sent an email without the content.
There just are no sophisticated tools in Facebook – everything is like a shallow version of what we’re used to on the outside. For sure, the apps have started to put some depth back into the system, but it’s hard to imagine that we’ll en masse abandon our email and our IM and our other contact and memory tools and use the stubs that Facebook offers. Not for a while anyway, we’ll get disillusioned and wonder off as our attention drifts.

I know this will sound very shallow and pathetic, but I really can’t imagine living with #3b5998 only for the rest of my life. As someone who was working with the web when there was not even any right align, let alone fancy layouts or the CSS wonders we see today, it pains me to have to use such a limited interface.
With respect, it is the sort of interface that the East German government would have commissioned for their citizen network if they had lived to see in the true glory of the web. Where I come from we call this colour Navy Blue and with good reason, children grow up to hate it.
Allied to the fixed layout, 3b5998 is the antithesis of everything that design stands for and everything that the web has taught us – that we are individuals and that we make and remake our environment to work with our needs and desires.
Even Google, that great interface reducer, has relented and offered multiple funky interfaces to their start pages. So what’s with the fascist control freakery? Don’t you trust me to change things the way I like ‘em? Think I might, like, go mad with funky colours? So what, that’s my freedom.

I live in Brighton & Hove, East Sussex, UK. So for some reason that’s my network. It has 54,384 members who, I guess, live in Brighton and Hove. The total population of Brighton is 247,820, which means my network contains approximately one sixth of the entire population of this town. There are only 117032 15 to 44 year olds, which means that almost 50% of them are members of my local network. Huh? I mean, this is some kind of groovy town, but I find that rather unlikely.
More to the point, what the hell am I supposed to do with a network that includes every single sentient being between the ages of fifteen and forty-five in my town? I see I can go to a costume making event at 2pm or GUILDFORD MONDAY NITE at 7pm (that’s Guildford, not Brighton, but hey). Popular in Brighton and Hove includes the facebook wide food fight and Brighton’s Largest Water Fight. The Discussion Board has 164 discussion topics, starting with ‘How Many Ways To Say I Love You?’, but frankly life’s too short. And then there’s The Wall. 754 posts starting with a bit of spam from Ben Williams.
To say the will to live deserted me at this point would be an exaggeration, but to say the will to live in Brighton and Hove fled my feeble frame just about sums it up. Why am I in this network? I am a sophisticated online denizen, I partake of and participate in hundreds of online societies and fora of all kinds. Some are good, some are bad, some are essential to life. But none are as depressingly pointless as this all consuming Brighton and Hove Network.
And yes, I know I can change my regional network, but what exactly would be the point of that? I quite like seeing my local friends’ faces peering out at me from the sidebar – but that’s not quite enough to make it worthwhile.
I guess this approach worked quite well when it was a college based network, but imagine what it is like to be a London or Shanghai network member – they’ve elevated inanity to a whole new level.

Facebook, like MySpace, has not been able to successfully fund itself via advertisements. Click through rates are low, and MySpace has tried desperately to salvage funds from these ads. MySpace’s home page is filled with ads that most users don’t click on. Case in point: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/
feb2008/tc2008024_252834.htm?chan=search
Unless Facebook can gain revenue from ads it will suffer and possibly go bankrupt.

It can be argued by some that Facebook has taken over from Myspace in terms of which is the better social networking site. Although this may be valid, there is one area in which Facebook is clearly lacking – and that is music. One of the main building blocks of Myspace is the close links with music – bands can have pages on which they are able to upload their music and reach out to a new crowd, members may add a song to their profile which gives other users more of an idea what the person likes and there is even the Myspace record label, getting physical copied of music out.
Although Facebook are now beginning to add pages for artists, these are not as advanced or as easily personalised and those on Myspace. Facebook has not been built on the foundation of music so it will be more difficult now to lure over music lovers from similar social networking sites (such as Myspace, PureVolume and Buzznet) that cater more to their tastes.

If a ‘fad’, then Facebook’s passing will only have been hastened by the widespread concerns over identity theft as reported in the UK national press.
Perhaps more importantly, people have grown increasingly aware and scrutinising of Facebook’s capacity to allow potential employers to ‘snoop’ on one’s character as an employment suitability exercise. In short, people grow less and less eager to share their lives on the web, curiously perhaps because Facebook has been thrown open to wider and wider groups of people.