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I love to hate Facebook. It’s practically a hobby of mine. It blows my mind that Facebook is largely considered to be the new Google. I mean, even Google employees are defecting to Facebook. Lots of them! To friggin’ Facebook! A company whose website can’t even implement consistent navigation control: half the time when I click my back button, nothing happens. I’ll click a second or a third time and then maybe it’ll finally respond, but it’ll dump me two or three pages back instead of where I wanted to be. Granted, I only log on about once a week so I can turn down all the friend requests from people I either don’t know at all or barely knew 15 years ago when I sat next to them in English class. Maybe during my admittedly limited exposure to the site I’ve encountered a disproportionate number of annoyances like that. Maybe. But that doesn’t seem terribly likely. A more likely explanation is that the site sucks because it’s been thrown together at breakneck speeds over the past few years. I remember MySpace suffered from similar flaws. The last few times I attempted to look for long lost friends from high school (‘real’ friends, I mean) I’d only get about halfway through the search results before Facebook suddenly decided not to load the page I requested. Instead, I’d get stuck with a page devoid of any content, save the trusty Facebook banner up top. Oh, I’ll just click the back button and try again, I thought. Ha. Click… click, click, click… clickclickclickclickclick… oh great! Now I’m back on my profile page! Never mind, forget it. And somehow this is the site that is Holding A Commanding Lead In Search. Really? Man, that’s sad.

Besides all the lame technical hiccups, the site is a pretty big liability. Just the other day someone who could be best described as a business associate sent me a friend request. Now, if I ignore it will she feel slighted? If I accept it will I have to watch what I post for fear of appearing unprofessional? What about everything I’ve already posted? Plus, I have to wonder, was this a social overture or simply a business one? Luckily I rarely post anything at all, so my choices were easy. But I laugh at how often people seem to blissfully disregard the Costco-sized can of worms they’ve opened by blurring all their social boundaries. Sure, sure, Facebook has now introduced their Groups feature to address issues like that. I don’t know how well they work because I’ve never tried them. Really, the only reason I have an active account is for the relatively rare situation where a friend wants to show me a picture or something that’s only available on Facebook. And I guess I have a BitterMinion page, although I can’t remember the last time I did anything with it. But overall it still strikes as a lot of work to organize all your ‘friends’ into different categories and then figure out exactly who can see what.

Just like MySpace before it, Facebook invites everyone to be friends with everyone. That’s like inviting your ex-girlfriend from college, her teenage son, your current wife, your grandmother, and ten coworkers from all the different companies you’ve worked for to the same party. At best, it’s awkward. At worst, it’s the Big Bang of melodrama. Consider for a moment all the relationship turmoil that has been precipitated by social media. Personally, I like keeping my social circles small, compact, and discrete. Family in this corner, close friends in that one, business associates over there in the other room (with the door closed). Occasional line crossing is okay, but not as a giant stampede-style smorgasbord. I think the best social sites are the ones which are much more narrow in scope. Everyone on LinkedIn is there for business reasons. Everyone knows it and everyone behaves accordingly. Everyone on OkCupid is there for dating. Everyone knows it and behaves accordingly. (Even the liars who claim to be there strictly to make new friends are secretly there for dating. It’s true.) Sites like those are superior in every respect when compared to barnyard social scenes like Facebook.

Nevertheless, Facebook claims 500 million users. That’s roughly 7.25% of the world’s population. Pretty impressive, but I’ll be very curious to see how that changes over the next five years. Personally, I hope it dies a fiery death as people migrate to more dedicated social sites that haven’t been invented yet. Then we can look back and gleefully mock Facebook with the same scorn we heap on MySpace now. “Dude. Remember when Facebook was ‘cool’? What were we thinking? Facebook totally sucked man.” And if I were to really take this fantasy to its logical extreme, there would be a NEW new Google grabbing headline news for inventing something that’s actually useful instead of another social meat grinder/magic time evaporator. Ahhh, it would be grand! (I’ll be sure to update this blog post on 12/31/2015. Mark your calendars.)

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Addendum: Just days after I posted this blog, an article popped up on Google news highlighting brilliantly my point about the liabilities inherent in having a Facebook account. Personally, I think the school grossly overreacted, but the point remains the same: Facebook has a magical way of shining a spotlight on poor judgement so that the whole world can point and laugh. Somewhat ironically, the day after I read that article, I googled an old friend of mine that I hadn’t heard from in probably eight years and found his Facebook page. I ended up getting back in touch with two old college friends that day and that probably wouldn’t have happened without Facebook. If only Google would put their profile pages at the TOP of their search results, I wouldn’t have to admit that!

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