| The thing I find myself hating about all of these anti-Facebook rants is that they all seem to operate under the assumption that Facebook has "subsumed" all of this functionality from the internet at large, which seems spectacularly false. The number of people who "switched" from doing all of these things (blogging, IM, photo-posting, online gaming) on other sites to using Facebook for them is a tiny tiny minority compared to the number of people who never did any of them before. It assumes that if Facebook went away, that all of these people would just go "back" to using Blogger, or Flickr, or AIM, or Armor Games, and the internet at large would be a better place. I don't think that's even remotely true. Nerds can happily continue to use those services, and regular people will keep using Facebook. Sure, someday there'll be a "new Facebook", and then people can complain about that walled garden. People whining about Facebook feels very much like people whining about American Idol (or stupefying-ly popular CBS sitcoms). Like if 2.5 Men was suddenly cancelled, people would all start watching Mythbusters or assembling Arduinos. Providing "free" online services to a billion people seems like a giant win for society. |
I'm of the opinion that Facebook isn't going to get trumped by anything but an NGO. :(