Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Why Facebook Isn't For Me
After a month of experimentation, I have reached the conclusion that it won't work for me as a professional social networking tool. Now granted, I haven't tried setting up a private group, which I've heard some companies are finding beneficial. And I don't blog on it to tell my network of friends what I'm up to, because I don't have time, and if I wanted to, I would set up my own website where the world at large, and not just Facebook could see me.
I knew about Facebook's privacy concerns in publishing your activities to friends by default, but I was still surprised when the movie rental I did on Blockbuster showed up in my "News Feed." So I had to figure out how to adjust my privacy settings to block my purchases from showing up as "news" to everyone. Facebook should turn this off by default and ask your explicit permission before enabling it.
For anyone who's out of college, I see very little value in having the news feed taking up the majority of one's home page. I don't care when my friends get emails or receive a "likeness match." The only thing that might interest me is new blog posts, but those should be aggregated in an area where I go looking for them.
A much more elegant way would be to have alerts show up on the page that aggregates your friends, and if there's new activity, then allow me to see what's happening. That page doesn't indicate any activity.
Call me old fashioned, but I only want to see email messages intended for me or potential professional opportunities. Heck, Facebook doesn't even ask me for my personal or professional website. There is no easy way to search for job opportunities or integrate my professional life.
Since I'm in the Married With Children phase of life, LinkedIn is much more my style than Facebook ever will be. That's why I still have doubts that it will ever be a multi-billion dollar business. Some advertisers will want the 20ish crowd who make their bar-hopping plans online, but that's a smaller world.
Posted By John Gartner at 09:10 AM
Permanent Link: Why Facebook Isn't For Me
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