These last couple of days I attended FSOSS, Free Software and Open Source Symposium. An excellent event with a terrible name. It was an energizing and fascinating congregation of some serious nerds for some conversations regarding what open source is about, for, going, being and doing.
I’ve now watched all the presentations (thanks to the brilliant AV staffers grabbing videos of all the talks) and it made me realize a great many things, certainly the most coherent among them - Facebook sucks.
Openness is not always a good thing, it can often lead to poorly focused, wishy-washy unusuable software - I won’t bother with examples but there are plenty. Not only can openness be a detriment, sometimes proprietary just does a better job of things or at least has done so far - Microsoft Office is still better than any free suite out there, it does more is easier to use and is more efficient.
However, software like Facebook, or moreover, platforms like Facebook demonstrate all that is wrong with closed software AND all that is wrong with open source. Facebook is a social networking site wherein people can connect with others and by creating a profile and linking that profile with others’.
What’s the value in this? Well, social networks are pretty popular as a concept these days and Facebook is the most obvious implementation of such a thing. What use does it provide to its users? It allows them to collect information on their friends easily in a centralized, digestable form. Facebook categorizes relationships, status changes and the like - alerting you, for example, whenever someone changes their musical tastes or current mood.
This, in effect, eliminates the need for you to ask how someone is doing and engage in real dialogue to find out about another person’s state. It is the ultimate provider of weak ties, which is great if you’re looking for a job, but there are sites that do that kind of things better - LinkedIn comes to mind.
Doesn’t Facebook foster communities by providing ways for friends-of-friends to connect without depending on (absent) intermediaries? While it’s technically true that I can read the friends list of my friends, there is little I can do to “connect” with them short of messaging them or inviting them to join my friends list.
Part of Facebook etiquette is that you should have met everyone on your friends list or at least be in close communications with them - thus Friends list, rather than “nodes” or some other less intimate title.
Thus connections are either made randomly (hardly better than meat-space) or are mediated by a third-party (which is how its usually done in real life).
Community, communication and interaction are the hallmarks of awesome web software. Facebook falls flat on all of those. It reduces your social ties to baseball cards which you must amass in intricately organized decks. Facebook communities are poorly implemented and the “cost” for creating one is close to zero - thus a staggering majority of facebook communities are vacuous.
Communication is limited to text messaging - something we’ve optimized elsewhere.
Interaction is left up to the application developers - which have provided some meaningless widgetry.
Still, the information facebook gathers from users could be used for lots of cool stuff. “How many of my friends like Chinese food?”, “Of all my friends that like Kill Bill, which also like Hero?” are questions that could be answered with the data Facebook has - yet NO TOOL yet exists to gather this kind of thing and generate reports on it on a user level. That to me, would be the primary selling point.
The Facebook platform promises to allow us to go out and build solutions that leverage their data-stores. That, to me, seems stupid, they did the easy part and are now foisting the hard work out to open development and profiting off it.
This is why Facebook sucks.
Sorry to the Facebook guys who attended FSOSS - I hope I’m horribly wrong and I’m welcome to be proven that way.