I’m also going to expound on the glories of social networking sites in a moment, but first, here’s why I left MySpace:

1. No one else I knew used it in a meaningful way (or, at least we were never motivated to find one another).
2. The spam! Egads, the spam! Between malicious “friend” requests that, once accepted, would spam your friends list and the requests from people making tens of million dollars a week doing online surveys, it was seriously getting to me.
3. I really like Facebook’s “status update” feature – which is so terribly Twitter-like.

And here’s why I think social networks are the cat’s meow, and destined to eclipse “one trick wonders” like Twitter and (yes) Flickr. They let me do everything in one place and share it with my friends and colleagues. I don’t have to have two thousand desktop widgets keeping me up to date on what’s happening, I don’t have to visit twelve different sites to check and use twelve different functions – it’s all in one place, and (this is the important part) I can easily share my cross-format content. Not just my status with fellow Twits. Not just my images with fellow Flickrers. EVERYTHING. IN. ONE. PLACE.

And that’s why I love Facebook (but they could use a better blog-like function, though the “Wall” thing is pretty close).

Update: Just as I have demanded convergence in my technology, I demand convergence in my social media.

4 Comments

  1. Hey, you leave MySpace, and I leave Twitter on the same day…what are the odds.

  2. Wow: you just validated Paul Kedrosky’s observation:

    “Facebook is the Microsoft Office of social apps. In other words, none of the apps are particularly good — photo sharing, status updates, personal pages, events, groups, etc. — let alone being as good as their standalone counterparts — Flickr, Twittr, Typepad/Wordpress, Google Group, etc. — but most people don’t care. They just want their social software all in one place, all from the same interface, and then they want to move on and get their (social/presence) work done.”

    http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2007/05/27/facebook_is_mic.html

  3. Amy Scott

    Facebook just deleted a group I started against a local university (Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia) because they do cruel tests on dogs and cats. I am so pissed off !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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