I think Facebook's biggest failure is that they've never educated people on how to use Facebook well, and honestly, they have likely inadvertently encouraged bad practices with their emphasis on growth.

For example, why do you have friends on FB you barely know in reality? You should only have your genuine friends on Facebook. This simple rule solves the "annoying status update from someone I don't care about" problem, which is the most frequent complaint I hear about Facebook. I actively delete people a few times a year who I don't expect to see again.

They used to strongly discourage adding non-friends.

I remember when adding people you had to enter something for "How did you meet this person?" and if you checked "I don't know them", it would close the box and say "Well why are you adding them?"

That sort of thing goes out when advertising and paying for games and such via the system come in. People having many connections means that if someone lets you app in or "likes" the page directed to by your ad then you get a change to advertise to all those people on that one person's list of contacts. This is attractive to the advertisers, and makes paying money to facebook a better value proposition.

Facebook want you to be connected to as many people as possible because this network of connections is essentially what they sell. Just like Google, with facebook you are the product that is sold to the advertisers (the difference being that currently with facebook your friends are the product too, though that difference is set to vanish if Google can get the social thing right enough to attract a critical mass of users).

"Facebook want you to be connected to as many people as possible because this network of connections is essentially what they sell."

I agree, but I also think that eventually, this devalues Facebook.

It's like you had this party with all your friends, and then all your coworkers and former classmates and people you met at conferences and people who share your interest in banjo music all showed up too.

And eventually, it wasn't a party anymore; it was just a random collection of people. And you started thinking, "wouldn't it be nice if I had a place for just me and my friends?"

> And eventually, it wasn't a party anymore; it was just a random collection of people. And you started thinking, "wouldn't it be nice if I had a place for just me and my friends?"

Aye, I think that is what Google is going for. They might be early to the game though: have enough people got to that stage that FB will see a large number trying Google's offering just for that reason?

It's a failure in interface design and there's no reason to innovate the interface because it strikes at the core of their revenue stream which is all about hyper connectedness when the real value is in the type of the relationships.

It reminds me of search engines proclaiming "2,800,000 results returned". Really? Most searchers never go beyond the first couple pages in the query result set. Who cares? Likewise, other than playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, who wants to see all these tertiary relationships that mean nothing?

I instantly dismiss people who complain about this as morons. Why add people you don't know and _then_ complain about it?

If you only add your actual friends, Facebook is a pretty good experience. It's not perfect, you still have a to block a few apps, but once done it's not a bad place.

If you are in the high school - college - internships - jobs life stage that lots of Facebook users are in, you have a high friend turnover rate. You meet lots of people who you want to add on Facebook, then later maybe you want to keep them around so you can see what they're up to but don't want their posts mixed in with posts from your current close friends. And there's a thousand variations and stages in between.

Well I respectfully disagree. I don't think it's too hard to figure out if someone is really a friend or just someone you've met a few times. And if add them just to "see what they're up to" then sure, you're going to get noise.

I also think if you're adding people to your Facebook that have anything to do with your employment you're insane.

But maybe it is because I am 30+ that these distinctions to me seem very clear.

"If you are in the high school - college - internships - jobs life stage"

Read: Not you.

so, you regularly reject the friend requests of people you've recently met and/or people who you see from time to time but who you do not consider one of your BFFs?

I do, yes. I email or message the person to tell them this and why. A few people find it strange, most aren't bothered.

It would seem I am majorly in the minority in how I use Facebook. I figured fellow hackers would be similar, but it apperas not.

The whole problem is that the word "friend" has about a hundred shades of meaning in life, work, and love. Facebook's biggest problem -- perhaps their only problem -- is that they refuse to acknowledge that fact.

Indeed. If you don't use Facebook (and I was one of the last hold-outs in my social group), the "friend" terminology will lead you to believe that the people you attach to are actually friends, of which you can only have about 20 real ones. Then you hear that people have 120+ on average, and you think the whole world has gone mad. Facebook friends are, as a whole, just people who have meant something to you at some point in your life.

Twitter was better about this, in that following someone is a one-way connection, not a two-way one. Google+ lets you have it both ways: putting someone in your circle means you'll see their public posts (Twitter), if that person puts you in their circles, you'll see their private ones (Facebook).

Don't you just hide friends with consistently boring messages? I do, and people I know do. It's a big stick, compared to some more subtle faceting, but it mostly works fine, while putting some pressure on the reader to accept a certain amount of tedium in those people I still want to listen to. There's also event spam, but that one category you can filter out separately (i.e., "ignore events from person X").

Facebook already has a conceprt of groups. I frequently share my updates/pictures with only to select set of groups. It's just that it is a bit hard to use it. Nothing that facebook can't fix. Don't know what is so great about this.

The problem is that friend groups in Facebook are an afterthought at best and horrifically broken at times. To the point that they're nearly useless. I've had multiple instances of Facebook deciding to ignore my default post settings for a type of post or album, posting it wide open when it should have been restricted to a certain friend group (mobile apps are especially bad about this, IME).

Things I want to share with friends of family may not be things I want coworkers seeing. I don't want to share photos of drunken antics with bar friends with my grandparents. I don't want updates about a sick relative to become office gossip.

Yes, the feature sort of exists in Facebook to kind of get this functionality, but there is a massive appeal in a network that treats the idea that not all acquaintances are equal as a core concept. And because it's a central value of the network, I have a lot more faith that it should actually work than the Facebook model, which has already failed me plenty of times in the past.

The problem with FB groups is that both you and the friends that you want to share the link/photo/message with have to agree to be part of that group. I usually put my friends in multiple groups/circles, i.e. they could be a work colleague but also a eating out enthusiast. This multiple categorization can easily get messy and definitely doesn't scale to hundreds of friends.

Hopefully, with Google+ Circles my private categorization of my friends is not shared with them. They should only see what I share.

It's actually called list. Groups in FB is something different. Try creating a friend list and then you can share it with only that list.

You can't share with lists alone. Facebook sharing options are friends, friends and networks, Friends and their friends and so on. Or you have to add each friend individually. It's just weird how lists are pretty much useless in facebook.

Sure you can. In the status update thing, click the padlock and choose "Customize" and then "Specific people", and you can enter lists of friendlists.

(Granted, it's not very discoverable)

Yep, my default sharing option is "Friends Only; Except: Work"

Only bummer is that you can't do fancy options like that with the Facebook iPhone app. You can only do your default, the normal options like Friends Only, or specific groups.

Although the feature is not as advanced as circles, you can make wall posts on Facebook visible to only certain groups of friends. Google+ forces you to pick a circle (or everyone), rather than just defaulting to everyone.

Google does have powerful friend grouping features, and you can hide your information/posts/photos/etc from any category of friends you want. You can hide them from specific friends, and you can hide individual items in the same way. And the news feed can be filtered easily as well (although without as much fine grained control as content you produce).

Overall, I think that Facebook needs to do a better job of educating its users about these features, and make them more prominent, but I find these features are certainly quite adequate.