A friend on mine said this: “I think they’ve just lot touch with what most of their users want from Facebook – a way to keep in touch with their friends,” upon the news that Facebook is making a big announcement, one which is expected to involve a new way of streaming music.
Among the other new features added by Facebook recently was the new option of subscribing. This would make your posts public to a group of people, whilst enabling you to maintain a private profile as well. Although, I may not be explaining this right, and I am usually quite computer savvy. Yes – Facebook is confusing me, for the first time ever, and I just don’t like it.
My Facebook profile is as private as I could make it. My photographs are friends-only, my status updates are friends-only and my profile is basically empty to anyone I do not have added as a friend. I refuse to add people I do not know. For my public internet persona, I have Twitter (come add me!). I did complain a lot about Twitter originally, and most of those opinions still stand, though I have found it excellent for breaking sports news (some cricket news today was on my Twitter feed quicker than it hit Sky Sports News) and a great way of publicising my blog. Views of my sports blog have gone up a huge amount since I became more active on Twitter.
But for me, Facebook and Twitter are entirely different. Twitter is for the things I would share with the world; one or two carefully selected photographs, links to my blog, my opinions on sport and the fact that I have a blue toe because it is so darn cold. Facebook is very different; I will share that I went to Pizza Express with my close friends and that I had a lovely time, photographs of mine and my boyfriend’s holiday, opinions that I don’t want every single person in the world to access to. Yes, I have close to 300 friends on Facebook, but there is nothing on there that I have to hide from people I know.
Twitter is about networking. Facebook is about friends, and that was all it was ever supposed to be. Now it is getting a little bit less like Facebook and a little bit more like… well, nothing we had before, but something a lot less personal and potentially, a lot less private. Facebook, for me, is about sending messages to friends, sharing photos with friends and talking to friends.
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While I am discussing social networks, I dared to venture onto Google+. I set up an account, added a few photos and then realised that no one I know is on Google+, I have no idea how to add people to ‘circles’, find it horribly confusing and believe Twitter is so much easier.
Well as for “changing the world of social media”, I’d say its more “changing facebook to be something that is no longer just social media”.
Google+ is actually great and pretty simple to use, but like you said, the problem is noone is really using it yet – I think once enough people start using it, I might get rid of facebook altogether, because it seems to be changing in a direction that’s making it less of what I want it to be.
Facebook did steal pretty much the whole of its new privacy setting ideas from Google+ though… you add people to a list/circle, then choose which lists/circles are allowed to see your posts. The small difference is that of subscribing, which you dont do so much on Google+, although I think you can actually set something similar up. And curious that facebook lined up these updates for the day Google+ became open to everyone…
It used to be a minor annoyance when facebook changed something, but now it’s so frequent that it’s become a major one. Plus like you said, the myriad of new buttons is a little confusing (you now have to make more clicks to return a poke even!) In the end, I think facebook are going to end up frustrating their users, and losing them if they keep this up! Please just stop changing things…
I always used to understand Facebook, but it’s suddenly become so unclear. I don’t think I’d change the way of using it – photos, messages and being generally amused at little aspects of my friends’ lives.
Yeh, it’s just become a giant cloud of different buttons and options – and as for the annoying little sidebar which follows you everywhere, saying generic things like “Dave has liked his own comment on Barry’s wall.” Why do I care?!
I agree. And it just looks messy. Facebook was always appealing when compared to the days of Bebo and MySpace because it was so clean and visually easy to look at. Now it looks over-cluttered.
Maybe Zuckerberg thinks everyone wants to know what people are doing in real-time… which is just a little creepy.