Has Facebook Jumped the Shark?

I can’t say that I agree with this one 100%, but it certainly is an interesting rant - over at the Industry Interactive, Inc. blog is a post titled "Facebook has failed us (or Facebook is like so Web 1.0)".

J Lane writes that Facebook is lame because the Facebook apps "suck" and it "does the peripheral activities poorly." Mostly, his arguments against Facebook are of the walled-garden variety…not enough integration with outside services - just do everything on Facebook. That is,  photos on Facebook are photos on Facebook…you don’t import your flickr pics, you can’t integrate with Picasa. Email on Facebook is email on Facebook - it’s not "real" email. 

To quote:

Facebook is pretty good for the beginners, but fails for people like me. There is no way that I’m going to upload photos to two separate places. Having to choose between Flickr and Facebook? Sorry Facebook, you lose. Having to pick between responding to comments on my imported Facebook notes, or comments posted on my blog? Sorry Facebook, you lose again.

It’s redundancy that’s the issue. What purpose does Facebook serve now that our online lives are aggregated into one big lifestream? What do I see in my mini-feed that I didn’t already see in my FriendFeed? An imported blog note? A status update? Everyone has already integrated their Facebook status with Twitter! A photo? I saw it on flickr last week when you uploaded it. So is Facebook turning into a place to throw zombies at each other and write "happy birthday" on people’s walls? Maybe it’s fun to join groups, but are you joining just to join or are you participating?

What has Facebook done for you lately?

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Yesterday, I wrote an article on Read Write Web entitled "The Conversation Has Left the Blogosphere" about all the various ways the new lifestreaming and aggregating services have moved the conversation off of blogs and onto FriendFeeds and Twitter and the like. (Follow the conversation here on Techmeme. The post was inspired by Jason Kaneshiro’s post on The Blog Herald.) I’m really interested in the conversation that has developed around this topic. Larry Dignan on ZDNet asked "Do You Have to Be in Every Conversation?" But it’s Allen Stern who notes that the bigger issue is that readers of his articles miss the discussion. He then points out that there’s a business idea here, saying:

"What’s needed is a way to centralize the conversation back on the original content source while still allowing users to get involved on the platform they choose."

However, Mark Krynsky, thinks that 

"People are losing interest in commenting on blog posts. This dialog is usually limited to the vacuum that is just the author and other commenters. Twitter and FriendFeed offers us the intimacy of  sharing ourselves and our data with our immediate circle of friends."

If FriendFeed and the like are inspiring conversations because they are more intimate conversations between friends (which very well may be the case) then blogs, formerly the locale of these conversations, have failed.

What killed the blogs, then? I think it was spam. Well, not the spam itself, but the tools blogs used to fight it: the comment forms you had to fill out providing an email address, the CAPTCHAs, the authentication methods, the comment moderation, etc. - that’s what did the blogs in. The immediacy of the conversation was killed.

This is where FriendFeed came in and solved the problem. One click and you’ve commented. Simple, basic, easy, immediate. Plus you could comment on everything, not just links, but tweets, songs, anything. And the ingenious "Like" feature is the perfect digg-like tool that lets you opine without writing a word. Blogs, meanwhile, suffer with no comments. New readers do lose out because they’ll never know what other people really thought of the topic…and yes, Vlad, that matters.

I hope some developers see the eagerness people have for a tool that centralizes our conversations, be them on Twitter, Digg, FriendFeed, RSSMeme, etc. and lets us follow them and mash ‘em up and stick them back into our blogs. Don’t just give us our lifestream, let us USE IT.

And listen up: I want an all-in-one tool. This is where a service like cocomment could stage their comeback (is anyone still using this, I wonder?). Their site claims they will track all your conversations, but I want to track "conversations," not just "my conversations." If I write professionally for RWW and it gets dugg and commented on in the digg comments, I may or may not be joining that discussion, but I sure as heck am interested in following that conversation. Where’s the tool that does that?

And FriendFeed, start creating some solutions here. I mean, look how excited people were to discover a way to filter your FriendFeed services via Greasemonkey, something I just discovered on Corvida’s site.  What kills me about this is that the creator of the script comments on her post that

"The script isn’t doing anything that smart… all I’m doing is using features on friendfeed that are kinda hidden."

Wait - What? Features? Where? I don’t see these features anywhere. I hope the FriendFeed dev team is listening because that should be built into the product. A Wordpress plugin that integrated the FriendFeed conversation around your blog post with your Wordpress blog would be nice too.