
Are the Cool Kids Leaving Facebook?  - buckpost
http://www.markevanstech.com/2008/01/04/are-the-cool-kids-leaving-facebook/
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cperciva
The Cool Kids aren't leaving Facebook; the Cool Kids were never on Facebook.

Facebook, like Myspace before it, gained popularity for the same reason as
sports cars are popular -- people used large lists of "friends" just like
powerful car engines to compensate for their feelings of insecurity and
inadequacy.

This isn't to say that social networking sites have no useful purpose: Just
like sports cars provide the service of getting from point A to point B,
social networking sites provide mechanisms for manycasting news. But this is a
secondary function of far less importance than compensating for genitalia
size.

~~~
iamelgringo
What he said.

I don't think that the cool kids ever were on Facebook. They're all too busy
on Hacker news.

~~~
paulsb
Hear, hear.

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sethjohn
Like a hot night spot, each social networking site will eventually fall out of
favor to the next cool place.

The business-arc of social networking sites will be much shorter than for non-
social applications, and I'm not sure how anyone can ever build a decades-long
success on social networking.

T

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pkaler
I think the next hot social networking site is your own website.

I've been improving my blog with stuff like Twitter/Jaiku widgets, OpenID,
Gravatar, photo albums, etc. I can push my presence out using RSS. Piece by
piece I'm adding all of the useful features of Facebook.

I can own all of my own data and control all of my own privacy.

I use the Wordbook plugin for Wordpress to bridge to my Facebook profile.

~~~
jraines
I agree! I actually stayed up all night the other night doing that. I
registered www.jeremyraines.com and it just uses ruby's xml and rss parsing
libraries to scrape certain pictures from my flickr account, certain kinds of
posts from my tumblr, and it has my friendfeed widget on it. I had more fun
building it than I've ever had on facebook -- I learned some stuff about
XPath, Ruby, CSS and regular expressions.

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tarkin2
Well, I'd like to leave, primarily because I don't trust facebook with my
personal information, or at least I want to be in control of how it's used.
But I often find sending messages with facebook more pleasant than sending
them via my email account for some largely aesthetic reasons. And I really
enjoy being a little closer to (knowing about, basically - photos, status
updates, etc) my geographically distant friends and email does not permit that
at the moment.

I'd definitely leave for an open, easy-to-use system where I am in control of
my personal data's usage. Perhaps an open protocol that email providers could
abide by. But until that day I'm sure I'll stay, albeit while attempting to
minimise the personal data I exude (which is difficult, I know).

