So this morning, I received an email from Facebook telling me:
“You haven’t been back to Facebook recently. You have received notifications while you were gone.”
My first reply to this was “meh”.
This evening, I got home, and had another look at the email. Apparently I have “9 photo tags”.
Is that right? Does that mean I’ve been tagged in 9 photos? That seems pretty unlikely really.
What’s more odd is that clicking the link to see these 9 photo tags, takes me to this page.
Right. What’s that about then? No photo tags, just Facebook trying to get me to spam a load of my friends, surely? Classy.
I’m giving serious thought to completely deleting my Facebook account lately.
I rarely log in, because it is really boring.
If I wanted to keep in contact with people I went to school with, I’d have remained doing just that. And as for whether a friend of a friend likes the same films as me, I’m not that interested. Farmville schmarmville – I’ve got better games to play.
During a recent conversation with someone who hates a lot of modern technology, we discussed Twitter and Facebook. I described Twitter as an information sharing tool, and Facebook as a complete waste of time.
For me, Twitter is a way of sharing information in real-time.
Yes, there are people who are “having breakfast”, but not many. There’s a lot more “have you heard this interesting news? <link>” or “I’m watching a really cool animation at <link>” or pointing me in the direction of an interesting news story that has literally just broke. It’s constantly updating. An endless stream of instant news from around the world. It’s news one minute, it’s old news an hour later. But you can still dip in and out, because the really interesting video clips and news stories will spark debate and stick around.
Through hashtags, you can share the experience of a really interesting TV show. I can sit and watch Dragons Den, and if I wonder whether everyone thinks this idea is as stupid as I do, I can find out, via a quick search of #dragonsden, all in nearly real time.
Facebook is allegedly for keeping in touch with people you already know, but I think it’s just a big noise machine.
Remember Sarah? That hot girl at school you never really spoke to? Look – why not make her your “friend”, and go and look at all her photos.
Remember Dave? He’s got a better job than you, a bigger house than you, and he’s just spent 3 weeks having a better holiday than you’re going to have this year. Here’s 50 photos to prove it!
Remember Kerry? Well Kerry’s had 2 kids already – here’s a 150-picture slideshow of incredibly-similar pictures of them.
It’s like signing up to the Michael Buble newsletter. I might get to see exclusive galleries, and know what his favourite film is, but who the fuck cares? It’s just boring tedious photos and other information about someone boring that I don’t know, care about or like.
Yes I could do the sharing of information via Facebook, but there’s so many more adverts and other distracting shit I don’t need, and honing in on one live topic seems a lot harder.
If you’re with a group of friends and someone tells a funny joke, that’s all you need to pass on. Nobody needs to see 50 photos of how you got to the room where the joke took place, with all the individuals tagged and named.
The twitter version of someone coming back from holiday might be “Finally back in the UK. Greece hot, sunny, beautiful. Can’t recommend it enough. So what have I missed here?”
The Facebook equivalent involves a boring slideshow of 100 pictures, and having the same conversation over and over because each of them can only see one side of your wall chatter.
Several people have told me that Facebook helps keep them in touch, or organise social whatnots, but it’s a load of bullshit. There is nobody in the world who has so many good actual friends, that they literally never have time to see them in person, or call them on the phone.
The people in real life you don’t email, text or phone, are the people you can’t really be bothered keeping up with.
It’s certainly true of me.
