Facebook vs. Hipsters

Tom: In early July, while holidaying in New Zealand, I crashed my snowboard and wound up stuck in hospital, bedridden, for two weeks. After the first few days the pain subsided but I was left with basically nothing to do. New Zealand may be one of our closest neighbours but I was still stuck in a foreign country with very little in the way of company or entertainment. Smart-phone to the rescue! I was able to pay for internet access using my debit card and soon acquired a plentiful supply of megabytes to consume – the largest culprit being Facebook. It allowed me to keep in touch with people while I was stuck in hospital, look at all the photos of the rest of my friends as they continued their holiday and I even got to talking with someone I hadn’t seen in years. This may seem like old hat to you more regular Facebook users but this was the first time I’d used Facebook in months.

Sure, I jumped on the bandwagon when it first got going. But I soon found out my time was better wasted on other websites. While Facebook did offer an amazing degree of connectivity, I found that the people I really wanted to talk to I saw on a regular basis anyway. If not, I’d just call or text them. The games and apps were generally just rehashes of things that could be found better elsewhere and the ability to share links and videos inferior to bookmarking sites like reddit or digg. While easily accessible, I generally found Facebook to be just mix of activities I could do somewhere else and I gradually stopped using it. There was, however, one thing that kept me coming back on the odd occasion; the photos. If I want to see all of my friends photos from a concert for instance, Facebook makes it incredibly easy. In fact, I can barely remember a time when photos would be shared by any other way. That aside, I generally steer pretty clear of Facebook.

As far as I know, this used to be a fairly ‘uncool’ thing to do. Facebook was growing and growing and people who still hadn’t migrated weren’t up-to-date. But in much the same way as its predecessor, Myspace, Facebook is beginning to lose its favour with the masses. Ironically, because of how large its getting. Where once Facebook was a place to chat to your close friends and tend to your farm it’s now been taken over by every member of your family, young and old. How can a place where your Auntie Ruth scolds you on your language be considered cool any more? I think Facebook is doomed to fail because of its accessibility.

Although It still has some way to fall before entering the ‘niche realm’ of Myspace I think it’s only a matter of time before people move on. But with such a large following its unlikely Facebook will ever quite fall of people’s radars. I just think it will simply become a smaller scale version of what it is now, and ultimately a place to share and view photos (the only truly useful function it has now). The question becomes: “Where will everybody go?”. I don’t see social networks dying any time soon, people love to socialise. A Facebook replacement will have to be similar enough for people to be comfortable yet different enough for it to be fresh. Well, if you followed the Facebook privacy issue a few months ago you may have already heard of Diaspora: the new kid almost on the block.

Facebook’s privacy has always been under heavy scrutiny (in fact, it’s privacy policy has undergone so many revisions it’s now longer than the United States Constitution) but it was a roll-out of changes in December 2009 that sparked an internet uproar. The changes included making user profile photos and friends lists publicly visible, even for users who had explicitly chosen to hide this information before. Information like the gender of partner you are interested in and relationship status became viewable to those even without a Facebook account. At one point it was actually impossible to keep information like your friends list private at all. Many people lost faith in Facebook’s ability to keep their personal information private, and among those were four college students who went on to design Diaspora. In their own words: Diaspora is the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network – or at least will be, it’s first release is in September. Will this be the new Facebook? I’m not entirely sure. It looks incredibly promising (I might just have a soft spot for open-source) and I think if people are willing to give it a shot it will prove to be much safer and far more useful than Facebook. While only time will tell, we migrated once already and I think it’s about time we migrated again. My only concern is for all those abandoned farm animals..

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This is a submission for my University’s magazine, The Pelican. You can see Aaron’s here.

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