I don't use Facebook personally. My wife and family use it quite heavily, and I've seen the interactions on it.

Those relationships you think you're keeping alive by staying on Facebook are not worth keeping, generally. I graduated before social networks were a thing, but I distinctly remember having groups of friends at school who just didn't matter much outside of it. I'm 30 now and only keep in touch with two people from HS. They were my best friends at the time, and have largely stayed that way.

When I am trying to find someone to hang with, I just call or text them. There's no back and forth online with everyone watching our conversation, liking or commenting on it. There is no judgment.

My wife has almost everyone from high school added as friends on Facebook, but when it comes down to finding a real friend when she needs one, not a single one of them are there. Sure, they'll like a status or comment on something she writes, but none of it means anything.

It saddens me that people feel like they NEED these relationships that would naturally disintegrate without online networks.

>It saddens me that people feel like they NEED these relationships that would naturally disintegrate without online networks.

>When I am trying to find someone to hang with, I just call or text them.

It saddens me that you need these relationships that would disintegrate without cellular communications technology.

It saddens me that there are people with friendships that would disintegrate if they left their current job.

> if I cut myself off of Facebook I'm losing out on a huge, huge percentage of social interaction

Is it possible to have a Facebook account but just use it as a back-end? For instance, don't use the website or the app. But use Cue to pull events out onto your calendar, and Verbs to get Facebook chat, and so on?

https://www.cueup.com/

http://verbs.im/

Is there a way to use a constellation of apps that access Facebook info so that you effectively don't have to be on Facebook itself?

I don't even use cueup. You can pull fb events directly into a gcal.

For me, using fb as a backend has proved to be really effective in eliminating a lot of the social 'noise' while not missing out on fb-only event invites.

Cool, I didn't know about Verbs for chat. I've linked FB to my Google Calendar before, the only problem with that was people making month-long events for college promotions -- you don't realize how much calendar spam noise your friends make until that data leaves Facebook's filters.

Is there value in utilizing Facebook's databases and allowing them to track your connections, but having to manage your own front-end for everything?

There was a time (maybe it's still possible) when Facebook Chat used XMPP, which means you could use a client like bitlbee or pdigin to connect.

It's still possible. I used pidgin today for Facebook Chat.

It was never very stable.

Define stable. Do you mean it crashes? or that it drops out once in a while? Because I use Facebook over XMPP and I've never actually experienced any problems.

It dropped a lot when I tried using it, and the "in browser and Adium and a Pidgin" combination was super unstable -- caused it to crash a lot more. It may have improved, but I couldn't get it to stay connected more than 15 minutes. This was about 2 years ago maybe?

This is awesome. I actually deleted the app and stuff for a few days, but the main problem was with stuff like events. I would have an event on FB but forget where it was and have to log in to check. I'm really not sure I could emphasize enough what a POS facebook is for actually interacting with other human beings.

I found facebook cannot beat google+ if focused on tech personalities. Facebook is great for my old world of interaction, but google+ appears to be better optimized for the scientific world. Both stimulate my mind, but I'm starting to spend more time on google+. Facebook development seems to have long been down the path to the cash cow.

I think pretty much everyone who uses Facebook is, at least partially, in this mindset. The network is so large that people feel as though they're missing out if they leave (whether or not that is actually true).

I signed up again, after a 2+ year absence, because I discovered solid proof that I was missing out. People would be surprised not to see me at some event or other, and I would comment that I hadn't been invited, and this would create confusion - "well, let me check facebook, I'm sure I invited you" - "I'm not on Facebook" - "Ohh....."

One of my friends had a special list of half a dozen people he still sent emailed event invitations to. It's extra work, though, and most people stopped bothering. I decided that my hate for Facebook inc. was not strong enough to make me willing to inconvenience my friends, so I signed back up.

When people wanted to organise birthday parties at my last office they just added it as an appointment in the calendar. I suspect that if most email clients ever are well integrated with calendars then that'll probably be the end for facebook. ATM, however, there's no good calendar software integrated into most email clients so arranging a meet - even if you've got the social connections stored on your phone - is a pain in the neck.

:/

If you don't mind me asking, what do you/we think would constitute a better network?

You mention privacy as a key factor -- I agree, but rationally a free social network must encourage sharing to stock its shelves with user information to provide to advertisers. In the other direction, there's App.net which can afford to enforce privacy because its income depends only on membership fees. (Unfortunately, membership fees inhibit the network effect.)

So what would make Facebook better? A better photo-sharing experience? An Events system which could interface with external apps? Or, does it go deeper? More users, I think, are recognizing that Facebook shows their friends only at their best, and are struggling to compare their lives to the glorified lives of their friends. Will the next social network open the door to deeper sharing, as opposed to more sharing? (Path comes to mind here...)

I have no problem with the fact that Facebook has to gather and distribute some sort of information on you to get advertiser money, it's just a matter of the way they do it. There's obviously the whole Facebook uploading all your contacts without your permission issue (IIRC, that's still going on) and the fact that for whatever reason whenever I open up the Facebook app on an Android device, the GPS icon in my notification starts blinking that my location is being obtained. Which, if it were a rough network-based location to get my current city for targeted ads is fine - but it's not, and obtaining my exact location without my permission is not okay. (That's one of the things iOS gets right - per-app configurable permissions, it's a shame Android has nothing like it without a custom ROM.)

To clarify, I think Facebook (the app) itself is fantastic. The issue isn't the tech, it's the shady behavior by the company who develops it.

I agree that the technology is impressive -- after all, serving a billion users boggles the mind.

I was getting at the faults of the platform, though. It seems that people are satisfied with Facebook's groups, chat, and events features, but not the news feed/status updates portion of the site. I was wondering aloud if a social network like Path, which seeks to encourage more honest sharing as opposed to a greater volume of sharing, offered some insight into why people are becoming dissatisfied with Facebook.

>stock its shelves with user information to provide to advertisers

People are always talking about how Facebook is selling your data. Is there any evidence for this? They'll use your data internally to target ads on behalf of advertisers, but do we know that they're actually giving the advertisers any information?

You're right. In retrospect that sentence had a negative connotation, but I didn't mean it that way. By "providing" I didn't strictly mean selling. Facebook encourages sharing to learn as much as possible about its users, then enables advertisers to fine-grain their target audiences based on specific information about users. I actually don't see a problem with that model, as long as ads are relevant to me and presented in a sane way.

They have to be selling the data because the advertisers certainly aren't using it. I turned of my adblocker just to see what kinds of adds I was being offered.

I could get cheap heating gas from a company 200 miles away, buy crap I didn't need including "magic" amulets and my favorite: get the exact degree that I already had from the exact university that I got it from.

Facebook knows I am an atheist with a college degree, the school I went to and what degree I got there and my current city, so they should have been able to filter all of those out. None of that information was tricked out of me, btw, I added it all myself.

Oh and the rest of the ads were 90% shitty dating sites (because, I suspect, that good dating sites don't need to advertise) more than half of which were obvious scams (again, I have a college STEM degree, don't show me the stuff that hopes to just get stupid people to sign up).

Facebook does allow you to opt out of any given add or all ads from that company but they don't even allow you to opt out of ads for a particular group.

So yeah, I hope Facebook is selling the information because I have no idea what else the use it for.

I left, then got an internship in the valley and needed a way to interact with my fellow interns before flying out. So I came crawling back. Everything you've said resonates with me - "not particularly close to" is also a HUGE chunk of my social circle. Makes you think, though, do I really need to keep in touch with these people? If I really needed to, I could find a way (call, SMS, email, etc).

I have gone cold turkey from Facebook, after years of checking/updating multiple times a day. And it wasn't hard, because I just realized that I wasn't interested in the lives of the 80% "acquantainces" any more. The fact that somebody I knew at some point got married is really not important to me (and my "Like" doesn't mean much to them). And I feel that if I need to contact a friend after a long time, it is rather easy to pick up where you left off.

I log into facebook about once every three months, usually when someone tells me in meatspace 'I sent you something on FB', like the invite details to a party. When there I have a poke around, and see how banal the day-to-day feed is.

On the up side, I sometimes have a chat with a random friend I met on my travels, but that in itself is not worth being sucked into the facebook machine, which is basically treading social water.

So thankful that Facebook came after all my friends got email! Only one got sucked into Facebook.

You're lucky, then. Facebook didn't become big until after all my friends were using email and AIM. They still switched to facebook because it's easier than email and AIM. I sent one of them an email last month and they told me they were confused because it didn't have a "like" button on it. o_O

> An important part of it mentioned elsewhere in the thread is the fact that Facebook basically acts as a glorified address book/communications hub - if I want Chris to come to my party or add him to a group conversation about something or share a picture with him, all I need is his name. Not an email, not a phone number, just a name. It's pretty incredible if you think about it. Nothing else comes close.

I thought I read somewhere teens aren't using real names on FB ? What's the general usage ?

Exactly two people out of 251 on my list have ever used pseudonyms. In both cases it was brief as it annoyed the hell out of everyone else and we told them so.

A spam-free email account where everyone can be reached by real name is really quite attractive.

Within my friends (high school), some use pseudonyms (or middle names as last names) to avoid being seen in revealing photos by colleges or employers.

Of the few hundred friends I have on Facebook (almost all under 18), not one is using a pseudonym. Not sure where you heard that.

I believe I read it here when the google plus real name policy was debated.

Here's an old article mentionning this fake name trend: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/oct/02/facebook-child...

I am not a teen anymore but I find this surprising because IRC, MSN was all the rage when I was younger and nickname was really the norm. Just like those [email protected] addresses.

I am a supporter of half-anonymous practices and I am surprised it's not more widespread than I believed.

Update: And from http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/Teens-Social-Media-A... I can see fake names seem to be marginal, with people managing at least one real/official account.

>all I need is his name. Not an email, not a phone number, just a name. It's pretty incredible if you think about it. Nothing else comes close.

This is the primary value proposition of Facebook for me, and why I continue to defend real-name policies. Not having to mess with a set of aliases is really quite convenient.

There is a lot of difference between being able to set/search by real name and being forced to do so.