No - it's because you've done something you think your friends would be interested in and it's a lot easier to take a photo and click 'post to Facebook' than to write to 30 people.
That's really the fundamental function of Facebook and any successor will probably succeed by doing it better in some way. eg. Snapchat enabling you to send naughty pics without them being archived on the web for the rest of your life and so on.
Then, Facebook filters all my friends' feed so only 50% of them see it.
All I want from Facebook is a way to reliably see all the posts from all the people I want to follow, and have it keep doing that. I have found settings in the past that let it happen, but it seems to reset to filtered every time I take my eyes off it.
Is there an easy way to choose who sees a particular post (ie, the way one sees a display of friends to click on when inviting them to an event)? They should implement this, allowing for deselecting unwanted viewers (rather than selecting for wanted viewers - for those with too many friends).
You should read more. http://www.prdaily.com/Main/Articles/Snapchat_admits_deleted...
Just to offer a different perspective: to me, the valuable part of sharing life events is the engagement with another person. IE, the extreme convenience (broadcasting 1-to-30 people) undercuts the reason for sharing: connection.
(I also have recently identified concerns I have with group mechanics, and this no doubt influences my perspective.)
I'm posting a picture a day. Surprising how many people go out of their way to mention how much they follow & like it.
THAT user experience (UX) has been the main issue I've seen with attempts at a distributed social network (such as Diaspora).
Note how easily email converges on big email providers too, rather than everyone running their own services. Gmail is definitely a brand. Lo and behold, Gmail is a service that is "free" but paid for by selling analysis of the content of your emails.
Have a look at bittorrent. Scale is not a problem. Money isn't either. Perhaps we should have a distributed social network based on it, or a similar technology.
If you were to build a system for distributing "wall posts" in a bittorrent manner, it would probably end up looking a lot like USENET with a group per-person. (Long ago I knew a couple of people who did in fact have their own newsgroup in alt.) That would also replicate the problems of USENET, especially with regards to spam fighting.
What does FB provide that you don't get with a combination of email/USENET/blogs/chat? Branding, janitors, and indexing.
Branding is useful because these things are so scale-driven that you want to be on the one that everyone else is using. It's easier for the uninvolved to figure this out if it's the one with huge advertising billboards.
Janitors are a necessity. Some are human, some automatic. People want spam to be fought, and they want abuse to be removed.
Between those two is the "nudging" of people into how to use Facebook. Why should you post life updates? Because it's the "done thing".
Indexing is useful because it enables you to find people you want to get in contact with using their human-recognisable name. (Facebook occasionally undermines this by refusing to accept names that people are known by)
Both of these are ongoing effort that has to be paid for if it is to scale and be done properly. Hence all the underhand cash-extraction processes.