I love the idea of Facebook, and I’m certainly grateful for what it has offered to me. I stay in touch with my friends, my close and distant relatives, and some organizations I care about to a much greater extent that I was able to do before. I started my Facebook account a few years ago for a simple reason; to keep in touch with my nieces and nephews, from whom I’d hear little if I didn’t “friend” them. I’ve since expanded my use to other friends, other relatives, sharing interesting content, steering people to this blog, and (perhaps most importantly) keeping track of birthdays. There are also the peripheral activities of games, giving virtual cookies, and other such fun nonsense. These I could take or (more likely) leave.
For me, Facebook was a good value. I got a platform for discussion and contact, it got to show me some ads that were keyed to who I was connecting with and what I was showing interest in. I may have clicked on one of them once. This was Facebook’s value proposition, and it was pretty clear to me in the same way television strikes its bargain with us; I’ll give you 42 minutes of content if you tolerate 18 minutes of commercial content (I know, that’s probably not quite how it is given product placement in TV programming today. Forgive me the simplification).
With the changes announced today in the "F8" conference, those lines, and the value proposition, are now very purposefully going to be blurred beyond the ability of a normal person’s comprehension. Facebook is no longer satisfied with knowing that you like the Beastie Boys. It's going to become linked with every kind of content delivery and type of application possible. It wants to know what and when you watch, listen to, and cook; how you exercise, travel, and socialize. It wants to map you as a person, determine your influence over others, and package you into a neat, “frictionless” (they love that word) collection of data. You can choose who to share your updates with, but the data – the value you give to Facebook – is available to any marketer that pays them for it. And the kind of data that they can collect this way is absolute gold to marketers.
I understand these new applications will have value for some people – they just don’t have value for me to the extent that I want to trade my data for them. And I’m not sure the excited people are thinking about the other side of the value proposition; what they are giving Facebook in return for the ability to listen to the same song that their friend is listening to (I can do this without Facebook, incidentally). I have no qualms about this and I won't judge people who strike this bargain. I do hope for their sake that they understand the bargain they've struck. Facebook, my friends, is not free.
I’ve always found a higher value in Twitter; I use it much more than Facebook. I like its flexibility and I like the variety of people that I can engage with. It certainly isn’t as user-friendly as Facebook, and it is nowhere near as slick as the new iteration of Facebook will be. But it suits me, and I understand what I’m giving up in privacy when I use it. I’ve bought into that proposition. I am also on LinkedIn for professional networking, and I’ve been exploring Google Plus, which I’m now liking a lot more than Facebook (although the “Like” button is curiously missing from G+, so my Facebook friends don’t know that).
So, sometime in the next week or so, when I can get the word out and plan for other ways of connecting with my family and friends, I’m going to consign my Facebook account to the dustbin. Adjusting to this will require some effort on my part; I’m going to have to be more creative in keeping in touch with some people. After all, the major value of Facebook is that it’s where everybody is (at least for now). I'll probably blog more. I’m going to have to be, ironically, more social – writing emails, making phone calls, and maybe even visiting some of you. I think you are worth the effort.
If you want to reach me, please don’t hesitate to look me up on G+, follow me on Twitter (@chrismaddox), send me an email or, if you want, you can actually call me. I still use my cell phone in “voice mode”. Call me old-fashioned.
