[adriand]

A lot of web apps - both the established players and the startups - seem to be in a "sort of, but not really" state. I'm pulling this from a column by Thomas Friedman about Russia ( http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/opinion/sunday/friedman-ru... ) where he says that Russia is "sort of a democracy, but not really". Applied to web apps, Facebook is sort of a way to keep in touch with friends and family, but not really, because it's mainly a pile of uninteresting crap streamed from a bunch of people you hardly know. Twitter is sort of a way to follow interests, but not really, since it's mainly a vast swamp of mind-numbing, hash-tag inundated stupidity that most people don't read.

That's not to say there isn't value in these services, because there is - I use both. It's just that it seems so half-assed. When you consider the ways in which, say, the introduction of the telephone changed society, Facebook just looks silly.

[dasil003]

> When you consider the ways in which, say, the introduction of the telephone changed society, Facebook just looks silly.

Or maybe just less elegant. Part of the problem is there's not really an obvious problem to solve. In the case of the telephone it was like: "what if you could talk to someone instantly across hundreds or thousands of miles, without a telegraph operator!". Then they did a lot of hard work to build a network to meet this end goal, which only does one thing with a dead-simple interface, and it changed the world.

With Facebook and Twitter it's a little trickier because what's the universal goal? We already had email, newsgroups, chat rooms, blogs, etc. So the premise is something like: "what if you could broadcast your thoughts and digital content instantly to thousands of friends and followers?". Right away it's sort of a head scratcher. If you think about it you come up with lots of little niches where it's handy, but nothing that strictly couldn't be done before. The secret sauce is that it's engaging and people like using it so you have a powerful network effect. But at the end of the day it becomes a type of noisy commons; It's heaps better than the truly public internet cesspools like YouTube, but it is increasingly inadequate for individual needs.

[dkrich]

"Part of the problem is there's not really an obvious problem to solve."

Isn't that just a nice way of saying that Facebook isn't useful?

I think the interesting take-away from this article is not so much that Facebook has changed the context by adding features that include a larger network of people, but rather that perhaps Facebook is most useful when you use it exclusively with a small network of people with whom you have very real, close relationships. Suppose Facebook had exactly the same features that it has now but was limited to college campuses where connections could be made only with close friends and classmates. Would the experience really be any worse than it was when the functionality was more limited?

When the author was in college and he had just recently joined Facebook (and presumably most people he had ever met were just starting to use it) his network was necessarily small and limited to those people whom he had recently met and socialized with. As the years went by, more and more people joined his network. But few, if any left.

The problem is that that is not an accurate reflection of real-world relationships. Over time people prune relationships, either consciously or subconsciously, but the point is that in the real world, relationships evolve and end, but Facebook doesn't do a great job of evolving with those relationships. Recently I find myself using Twitter more and more to the exclusion of Facebook because on Facebook I get inundated with a mixture of every kind of update, a very small percentage of which I care anything about. I don't de-friend people because that is considered rude and what if I do want to reconnect with that person someday?

With Twitter there are definitely times that I get inundated with annoying tweets, but because I can quickly and easily stop following somebody, it is very simple to maintain my network and keep the information presented to me relevant.

[dasil003]

I don't disagree with any of the rest of your comment, but:

> Isn't that just a nice way of saying that Facebook isn't useful?

No it's not—along two axes. First, I should have said "it doesn't solve an obvious problem", it solves many small problems of varying degrees of obviousness to different people. Second, it is not a unique solver of these problems.

Facebook is definitely useful, but it's not a home run in the way the telephone was because communication is no longer a technical problem.

[jrlevine]

well articulated!