When you consider the number of people signed up with Facebook, and the impact that it has had on the Internet and the whole idea of “social networking,” it’s hard to believe that it’s only a bit over five years old. That’s a long time to stay around in an industry where companies can explode with potential and collapse from negative press in the span of a few months. Part of their success has arguably been due to the way they’ve grown their user base; people who were already in the network generated enough word-of-mouth advertising to ensure that when the network size increased, there would be a flurry of people ready to sign up on day one. People at Harvard generated buzz at other schools in Boston, people at those schools generated buzz at schools state-wide, and then those people generated buzz at schools nation-wide, and then world-wide, and then workplaces, and then high schools, and finally everyone else.
I remember when Facebook announced that you would no longer need a university e-mail address to sign up for their site. A lot of people (full disclosure, including myself) were worried that the site would become flooded with exactly the type of users we came to Facebook to avoid. People with user names like “xXxEminem69xXx,” throwing around racial slurs like confetti, uploading 500 pictures of themselves making pouty faces or gang signs, filling their profile with animated gifs and quiz results about what character of Twilight they are. You know the type. Facebook was better than that simply by virtue of every member of the site being university educated, which brought a level of intelligence and maturity to a method of communication that didn’t previously have one. I know I’m making it sound like some kind of ivory tower, but the clean interface and simplicity and lack of advertising really did put it in a totally different class from similar services. For people like me who wanted to stay in touch with friends without having to deal with a site like Myspace, it was glorious.
But that was a long time ago, and as social networking has changed, Facebook has changed along with it. Twitter performs the most commonly used part of Facebook (wall posting) in a much superior way, smartphones are becoming better and better at keeping people directly connected, and Facebook suddenly isn’t the only game in town. Over the past few months they’ve made a lot of changes to their site, some of which have been met with mixed reaction, to say the least. Users complained that Facebook was becoming like Twitter, but in hindsight of course it was; Twitter was on to something, according to people who make money predicting that kind of thing, and it would be absurd to expect Mark Zuckerberg to listen to his non-paying user base instead of his highly-paying advertisers and investors. This guy turned down a $1 billion offer from Yahoo, so he’s either naive enough to value his reputation among Facebook users who don’t even know his name, or he knows he can hold out for more. And while people cried about the changes, they eventually stopped crying, and I don’t know of anyone who canceled their account because of it. Now I’m starting to think I may have to do exactly that.
See, for me, the real advantage of Facebook has never been the interface or the limited user base; it’s been the privacy settings. With other networking sites, I had a choice of not uploading content, making it visible to no one, or uploading content, making it visible to everyone. But what if I had an album of my friends and I going on drunk adventures, that I didn’t really want my co-workers to see? Maybe I don’t want my family members to know about my relationship status, or I only want specific people to know my political stances. I didn’t have the option of saying “I want some people to see this content, but not other people” and for a long time that held me back from putting anything online. I’ve grown up around computers; I understand that once something is public on the Internet, it’s almost impossible to make it private again, and I had no desire to get bitten in the ass by dumb photos I uploaded ten years after the fact. Facebook let me define exactly who I wanted to see what, right down to the individual photo. I’m not sure how many people used the security settings extensively, but I know I did.
Now, in an attempt to make Facebook more competitive with Twitter (according to TechCrunch), the newest option is to make content accessible to “everyone.” Not everyone on Facebook, but everyone on the Internet. On the one hand, this allows for “real-time search capabilities,” whatever that means. On the other hand, the fact that they are actively encouraging users to make information publicly accessible eliminates my entire reason for using it instead of other social networking tools. Even if I set my photos to be private, what if my friends don’t? With this change, I’ll be losing the last little bit of control I had over my online presence on the site. Someone can upload a picture of me, tag me, and based on their security settings, that picture is publicly available to anyone in the world until I un-tag it and hope that no one saw it in the meantime. That, my friends, is bullshit.
I’ve already been drawing back from Facebook for a while. I deleted all non-friend photo albums because of concerns over their privacy policy and apparent inability to communicate to their end-users how and why they were allowed to re-use uploaded photos. I untagged myself from almost all photos involving alcohol after I was reminded that potential employers were likely to look me up on Facebook. I don’t receive very many messages or notifications, and I haven’t updated my profile in a long time. Maybe the site has changed, or maybe I’m just not their target audience anymore (in fact, I know I’m not). Regardless, I’m thinking about getting out entirely and having all the notifications I care about sent to my e-mail. I’d still leave the account open, but really, I only need to check it when something that interests me turns up, and that’s happening less and less nowadays. Maybe I’m just getting older.
I know a few people who’ve taken the drastic measure of deleting their account entirely, mostly during exams or other busy times when they can’t stop procrastinating by F5′ing their account just in case something has changed. I’m not sure I’d ever outright delete my Facebook account, as it’s still useful when it comes to hearing about social happenings that people would rather invite their friends to en-masse than pick and choose from a mailing list. But if I can combine Flickr, Twitter, this website and my e-mail into a system that gives me all the functionality I need without any of the annoying privacy concerns, I wouldn’t feel bad at all about having one less site to visit every day.
