something to avoid.

Awesome post and a great insight from someone who actually made “the cut”. I’ve become quite dependent on facebook myself as have most of my friends and family.

In some ways it seems to me like email about 10-15 years ago and mobile phones around 10 years ago. At first they were new and unusual things that only a few tech-savvy friends had but they soon permeated throughout society. I bet if you told someone these days you didn’t have a mobile or an email address they’d be quite surprised and make all sorts of assumptions.

What’s different is that there are heaps of email services and thousands of phone handsets and plans. But facebook is just one service and it seems to be only increasing its market share. I’d say that this is because despite all the criticisms laid at it, it does a really great job of connecting people and is fantastically easy to use – even my less tech savvy relatives are using it with ease.

What I’ve actively done though over the past few months is start trimming it back. I’m no longer just adding everyone I know as a friend and I use barely any applications other than the core functionality. I’m keeping it more as a close friends and family tool and have switched to using twitter for more casual interaction with a wider audience and Linkedin for anything business related. I also keep facebook entirely free of any buiness related colleagues – that way pics of me having a few too many brewskis on backpacking adventures years ago are less likely to lead to awkward conversations

Will be interesting to see though how things pan out in five years time. five years ago MySpace was king and facebook was practically unheard of. Will facebook keep itself relevant and compelling for another five years?

paul