Facebook Fail

Why Social Networking doesn’t work – and why I left Facebook

I’ve written on privacy and social networking before, highlighting some of the problems with going online to ‘network’ with people. There’s a whole host of problems with it. But it’s not privacy I’m particularly bothered about. If privacy is something you are bothered about when you are on the internet, then you probably shouldn’t be on it in the first place. Just check 123people.com and type your name in and you’ll see what I mean – or even Google.

If you’re thinking of what else you can do, well there’s little point instead of using ‘aliases’ to protect your identity. It just creates a façade for people to hide behind, and with the internet, anything is generally traceable in the end. Things are recorded, logged, appear on your screen to appeal to you, and there’s little much you can do to protect your information with what you share.

I left Facebook. I wouldn’t be surprised if some people have come here to know why. In fact, the profile is still there, it’s just deactivated rather than deleted – thanks to Facebook’s policies which are controversial to some. That doesn’t bother me. What is rather annoying is that Facebook is generally broken – the privacy settings didn’t seem to work, shockingly you can’t ‘approve’ wall comments – and for what it’s supposed to do (bring everything together in one place), it ultimately fails. If you have friends, family and network for lots of different things then it becomes more trouble than it’s worth. You can control what you do, but not other people. You can’t for example stop people posting pictures of you (even if you are not tagged). Assuming you then find pictures you don’t approve of, you have to go through a reporting process. This, luckily has never been a thing for me, but I’ve seen some stupid pictures and tags in my time on my Facebook that if I was the person tagged, I wouldn’t want my family to see.

Essentially, for it to work, you need multiple profiles if you are going to use one site for everything – or have profiles on other websites for different things. So, as it is, I’ve left Facebook for whatever reason you’d rather pin it down to. For me, I can’t be bothered anymore and it’s more trouble than it’s worth. At the same time, I got rid of my MySpace too (account cancelled) after not using it at all for about a year.

I’d much rather leave ‘the drama’ to those that want it. I’ll do stuff I enjoy instead: blogging and I’m still on Twitter (which is so much better, I think). If people want to find me through social networking, what better way than having a dot.com? And what better way to contact through email, IM, SMS and phone?

Facebook fail – and I think eventually it will fall under it’s own weight.