
A tale of evolution. How Facebook and I grew apart. - crocowhile
http://gilest.ro/2010/a-tale-of-evolution-how-facebook-and-i-grew-apart/
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auxbuss
I wanted to agree with you, and I'm only on Facebook because of non-geek
friends, but I survive with twitter, newsfox (Firefox plug-in), and tumblr --
sometimes sharing via dropbox. Buzz is, unfortunately, a vacuum. And Google
Reader for some reason doesn't quite work for me over Newsfox.

I agree that Facebook is horrible, in many ways, and hasn't progressed much at
all in any useful or meaningful way (for HN-type users), but Google, while
having the tools, needs to apply them better to win over the market.

Hell, I'm desperate to lead my non-geek chums over Facebook's horizon, but
Gooogle's apps aren't there yet. Heaven only knows why, though :-/

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crocowhile
In a way I hope your non-geek friends will never join buzz because I
definitely experienced facebook jump of the shark exactly when my grandmother
and her tea friends started joining.

I don't know what google plans really are: I don't know whether buzz is so
unfriendly because they want to target a different audience or simply because
they don't see much future in it.

Reader is a good tool. It's faster than the aggregators I tried in the past
(netvibes mainly), it works on my phone and it has a smart stumblupon-like
feature that is promising.

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rorymarinich
Every friend I have left (51 at current count) has expressed doubts re:
Facebook use, and has contemplated switching to something. Every one came to
the conclusion that the disadvantages to switching far outweigh the advantages
of switching; more, there's no real competitor to switch.

You need to limit your Facebook friends. Having too many FB friends mimics the
feeling of being overly fakely social: You get much more closeness if you
stick to the people you really care about. Stop treating it like a monolithic
connection. Friend and unfriend people whimsically. Stick to people you really
care about interacting with.

Facebook is about the social. If you're not using it as a strictly
conversational tool, then it doesn't work well. (Other than sending messages,
but whatever.) It's not for documenting links, or documenting conversation.
It's about today rather than last week or last month.

And no other tool handles that as well. Tumblr doesn't handle conversations
well, Twitter doesn't handle multimedia well. Buzz is hideous and bad and it
gives me skin-crawlies; plus I don't have a Google account. If there was a
similarly social service, I'd consider moving over, but there's not.

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srean
I having waiting forever for google to support search operators in its reader.
I get by by dumping my entire feed locally. But there really should have been
a way to do this on their server side.

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foobarbazoo
Somehow, I doubt Facebook will miss you. The product is not designed for you.

~~~
crocowhile
Not now, definetely. But I did enjoy facebook in the past actually.

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jawartak
Isn't it slightly contradictory to not have a 'buzz this' button at the end of
your essay?

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crocowhile
Very much so. I just added it, thanks. As I said, I really just switched.

