The Fadebook

Facebook is quickly becoming obsolete to me.

The true story is that I used to be fairly active on Facebook, having upwards of 400 friends at one point. I found it amazing that I could find old friends from middle school and reconnect with them. Looking at pictures of class trips to Shah Alam city was fun.Then I realized that Facebook was just a waste of time. You spend more time looking at pictures of people drunk or with their kids. Now, don't get me wong, that stuff can be interesting but it starts to get old quickly.

So I deactivated my account.
I was happy with the decision and for a while, pretended that ingorance in bliss. I was proud of the fact that I was off the book and happy to tell anyone who would listen.

Last week, I reactivated my account.
Why? I am finding it a useful tool as part of my job search strategy. It helps me see what kind of presense potential employers might have in the whole "social" space. It has in some cases helped me better understand who I might be interviewing with (although LinkedIn is really where that is done best) and it has help me waste hours or time reconnecting with old friends.

But really, nothing has really changed on Facebook. It is still the same old boring thing it always was. I don't really see it as being all that dynamic. Content is fed into Facebook from so many sources (like Twitter) and I am getting tired of seeing things coming across each platform through many different people.
I am going to keep my Facebook account because I suppose I can use my privacy settings to keep everything private and because it's a great research tool but it really isn't the great connector it once was.
There was a study done by Facebook and The Economist a few months ago that showed that while some people have more friends and more contact on Facebook, the average user has no more friend and interacts with no more people regularily than the offline person.

So, in my mind, Facebook was great while it lasted but now it's time to watch Twitter go through the same transformation.And I really think that interfaces, platform and aggregators like Google Wave or FriendFeed that can tie it all together in a useable way will be the big winners in the future. Afterall, I rarely interact with twitter.com's website.