Why Facebook Is Useless

This is a guest article from Robin Cannon, who blogs regularly on web design, social networking and accessibility at his site Fog of Eternity.

I’ve had a Facebook account for a while, I have well over 100 friends, and yet I still can’t see any real point to it. Barring an occasional visit to clear out a huge backlog of invitations to pointless applications that allow me to hit a friend with a pillow, where’s the functionality? For all Facebook’s popularity and profile, it strikes me more than most of the other social networking applications as a case of the emperor’s new clothes.

My very initial experiences of Facebook were reasonably enthusiastic. I was encouraged to join by a friend, I quickly had lots of friends new and old adding me, and it was interesting to see how quickly those links were made. But I quickly realized that that seemed to be all it did. There was no extension to a network beyond people who already knew me.

What does it really offer?

Most effective social networking tools have functionality that allow you to demonstrate your value, your brand or your interest to a wider network. Whether that be an evaluation of your submissions to Digg, reactions to blog posts, or the thumbs up to your StumbleUpon discoveries, you’re adding value to a network. Your popularity to that network is directly related to that value.

Facebook is effectively static. Your value has few outlets to spread beyond your profile page – and there’s no real reason for anyone to visit your profile page unless they already know you. I see social networking as a method to develop new contacts, yet that isn’t the case on Facebook. There’s nobody on my Facebook friends list who I don’t know in one capacity or another already.

Compare that with something like Mixx, StumbleUpon or Twitter, indeed most other social networking sites. There my friends or followers are people who have chosen to follow directly based on the value I add – whether that be for entertainment, information or authority.

But there are thousands of applications.

And such applications they are. I could join a pro-wrestling application where I "fight" people all over the world. I could bite people as a vampire and be bitten back. I could talk about the books I like and see which of my friends like the same books.

But most of all, I could instead find that my most regular activity on Facebook is clearing out hundreds of invites. Invites that repeat on a regular basis (if I didn’t join the first time, I’m unlikely to join at the tenth time of asking). And they are all for applications that are pure fluff.

Entertainment applications are dominant on Facebook. I can see why the site is so popular with schoolkids and students, because it’s effectively a provider of simple and timewasting entertainment. Few of the applications provide any functionality beyond that, and those applications are so easily lost in the morass that they can’t develop.

It’s just a prettier Friends Reunited

Friends Reunited is probably the "Web 1.0" version of Facebook. It allowed you to link up with old friends, had some functionality to chat with them, and that was about it. For a little while it was hugely popular, with the same kind of press profile that Facebook has now.

Now Friends Reunited still exists, and it’s not an insignificant business. But its user numbers have been dropping for years (they claim 19 million members on their site, but evidence suggests 2.4 million genuine users) and ITV has had to abandon models it was using to monetize the service they bought in 2005. And I think its failure is down to the same factors that Facebook demonstrates today.

So, it’s entirely useless?

Websites and applications that allow you to keep in touch with friends do have their place. It’s sustained the likes of LiveJournal for a long time, and as I point out above Friends Reunited does still exist. But while such sites may have their moment in the sun in terms of press coverage and excitement, in the long run they don’t have staying power.

As any kind of wider social networking tool Facebook is largely useless. It doesn’t let you blog, it doesn’t extend your network beyond people you already know, and its main selling point is a large number of entirely trivial applications. It retains a high profile and high numbers now, with a young demographic, but I genuinely feel it has no real long term model for dominance.

This was a guest article from Robin Cannon, who blogs regularly on web design, social networking and accessibility at his site Fog of Eternity.