Having staved it off for years I’ve finally joined Facebook. Here are a few initial thoughts:
I was disappointed that the only authentication method offered was old fashioned passwords. We are still as an industry struggling with making the leap to a better means. And it’s not like there are none out there. OpenID and Infocards can no longer be considered new. A question for a future blog entry might be why these technologies are not succeeding. Indeed just this week SlashDot.Org ran a story about how OpenID is losing ground.
There is a whole different set of social rules on Facebook, and I don’t know what they are. For instance:
- One of my friends wanted to add detail about my previous employment experience, which is something I wasn’t prepared to do myself. And so I refused. Have I offended him? I don’t know.
- My initial “note” indicated that I don’t do much with FaceBook, and that people should see my blog. This elicited a long discussion, not involving me. If I don’t reply, have I offended?
Why is Facebook even necessary? Isn’t this what we want the Internet to be in general? Why should this form of communication be limited to one site? For one, people are tired of spam on the Internet and so they are looking for an email replacement. Beyond that, having one’s own web server is a royal pain in the ass. But moreover, the comment I got more than once was that a blog is isolating. Why is that? What makes this blog isolating as compared to Facebook?