Why facebook?

I signed up for a facebook account a couple of months ago now after a friend in the Save Milton Country Park campaign said he'd made a marketplace posting there. I'd never heard of facebook then. I think everyone has now.

I was keen initially. I set up my profile. Posted my likes, some photos, some videos, added some applications.

On the plus side I renewed some old friendships with people I'd lost touch with and that was nice but the more I looked at it the more I scratched my head and wondered what the point was.

I think what facebook is trying to do is offer a kind of sanitised internet - so you get a homepage (your profile), and email (messages), a place to advertise stuff and some applications (most of which suck sadly but I can see the diary thing might be of use).

But all of these I already have. I'd had a home page, or pages since ... well, forever really. We've had web pages on our own domain the-hug.org for nine years now and before that we had the-hug.demon.co.uk and even tallpaul.org, my vanity domain, is now three years old.

As for email I've got that. Had it since I joined CIX in the dark ages. I'm guessing fifteen years. When people email me the mail comes to my mailbox which I can read anywhere, on a variety of devices and mail clients. When I get a facebook message I get an email to tell me it's come but it doesn't tell me what it said, instead I have to log in to facebook. This is better how exactly?

Then there's facebook groups. Well CIX first provided the equivalent of facebook's groups two decades ago and still does a far better job of it. And there's Usenet too. Both of these pre-date the Internet and they're still out there. On the Web there are also more bulletin board web sites than you can shake a stick at (I think those suck too but that's another story).

And talking of Usenet I'm a participant in the cam.* hierarchy of news groups. I posted an advert there for a charity gig and also in facebook's marketplace. I know a lot of people will have read it on cam.announce. One person read it on facebook - so who's providing a better channel for advertising in Cambridge?

If I want to advertise something in Milton I can use our village chat mailing list milton-chat - where's the facebook equivalent of that?

You can also post your photos and videos there. It's not bad software. But if you post them there only people with facebook accounts can see them. Now if all your friends and family and everyone you want to see these are on facebook that's great. But mine aren't, and I have perfectly good software to host videos and photos on my own web site, and if you've not then Flickr, YouTube and a host of other sites offer photo and video hosting.

So, what's left? Well search on Google for "Paul Oldham" and I'm normally on the first page, often more than once. So if old friends really want to find me they can and sometimes they do. They don't have to sign up to facebook first either. My mate Hugo was recently found by an old friend from college in just that way.

Bottom line is that I feel I'm wasting time with facebook - it's a poor substitute for the what I already have. So I've stripped down my profile and I'm going to stop updating it on a regular basis. It will get implicitly updated whenever I post here as it reads my RSS feed and this is what I'm going to concentrate on from now on as it has a far wider (potential) audience.

So if you're on facebook and you want to get in touch with me just send me email. It works.