Columns

Am I the only person who's heartily bored with Facebook? I've been poked, SuperPoked, tagged, pinched, hugged, tickled, "pwn'ed" and even had sheep thrown at me. I've had fresh flowers sent, although with a million left to send you don't feel that special for it. I can see that Richard has added the Sketch Me application. Chris and Justin have received a new message. Kieran and Phil are now friends. Patricia has joined the group "Come and live with me" - sorry, my dear, but no. Richard wants to know "what sort of lover are you?", which is information he's unlikely to find out, even if he asks nicely. Alec has another new friend. Kristopher has some new graffiti.

Sean wants to know if he is like me, a question that's scary on more levels than I can imagine. Chris has scored four out of nine on the "Celebrities when they were young" application, which wasn't good enough to match Liam's score of 67%. And Vicky has thrown me a snowball.

It's rubbish. It's content-free, vapid twaddle. I joined only because I was being bombarded by emails from friends, colleagues and people I had bumped into in the pub who said I needed to be there, or be totally unhip. Since I define hipness, it was incumbent upon me to have a look. Now I've joined, I have even more email nonsense to deal with every day.

Worst of all, it appears you're either my friend or not. Maybe I'm a little old fashioned, but a friend is someone I know, care about and like spending time with. I have a smallish number of real friends, but a large group of acquaintances. Facebook makes

ADVERTISEMENT

no such subtle distinction - you're either a friend or not. So I have a whole pile of people listed who are acquaintances, leaving me continually annoyed at the streams of irrelevant messages left on my Facebook wall and the complete lack of granularity.

Some people have hundreds, nay thousands, of "friends". Either they have an exceptionally vibrant and time-consuming social life, or they're prepared to have anyone join in, in some desperate attempt at propping up their feeble ego and self-worth by defining it in such a two-dimensional way as "number of friends".

Then there are the groups where like-minded people can chat about the same topic or interest. Sounds good in theory, but the content is non-existent. I tried a number of public groups, only to give up in sheer desperation. We had conferencing nearly a dozen years ago in the Cix system, which is still trundling along and is still far more effective than this upstart. Facebook does a fantastically bad job of attempting to replicate the Cix mindset, and falls so far short as to be laughable.

What's actually there? A whole heap of third-party crapware put together by spotty teenagers who think it's cool to get friends to put an electronic carrot up their e-nose. And then to spread this nonsense like spam-laden e-wildfire.

Oh, and Facebook messaging takes the biscuit. If you want to send me a message, use an email. Receiving an email telling me that a message is waiting for me on Facebook is the ultimate in offensive communication laziness, even if the message appears in the body of the email.

So what are we left with? A weak piece of nonsense, polluted by third-party applets of dubious value, all swimming around in a pea soup of self-generated trivia. Don't forget, we've had online communities before - Friends Reunited was the last one where the interest faded as soon as the content stopped appearing. Facebook will go the same way - quite how the founder thinks it can be worth $10 billion is beyond me. (And, yes, I'm mad as hell that I didn't dream up an equivalent but better solution a few years ago - I too could be worth $10 billion today.)