Clunky Flow

via Valleywag:

After he left Facebook, Nipon Das wanted the social network to erase his personal information from its servers. Eventually that happened. But only after two months, a lengthy email exchange and — ultimately — threats from a lawyer. “It’s like the Hotel California,” Das told the New York Times. “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.” Facebook PR flack Amy Sezak claims the company is doing users a favor by making it easy to come back to the site after they quit. 6,000 members of the Facebook group “How to permanently delete your facebook account” don’t seem grateful.

Jean Burgess is deleting her account partly because of all these facets of her identity are collided together in an unnatural and unmanageable way on facebook. Which illustrates the point that faceted identity does not scale well and on facebook many people have discovered that it has been stretched uncomfortably out of shape.

Too many worlds colliding, too many invites to vampire garden pirate fishtank zombie kissing applications, and yes, I ended up with kind of too many friends from too many different spheres of my existence (not that I don’t love them all, really) for it to be non-complicated and fun.

And check out what your facing if you want to really remove yourself from Facebook…

Oh, and by the way, in order to delete your Facebook account, apparently, you have to not only deactivate it, but also delete every single item you have contributed to the site (messages, wall posts, posts other people have written on your wall, photos, links to contacts, profile information) and then email customer service and request they delete your account completely. Oh, and also, in order to delete absolutely everything, I’d also have to re-add every single one of the applications I’ve ever had installed, and then go through and remove the content, and then delete the applications again. Because when you delete an application, guess what? Your data is still stored there somewhere.

That’s not just meanness, but I’m pretty sure it’s also not just to be helpful in case you’re quitting in a fit of pique like this one and might decide later that you want to come back. It’s also because of the way the business model works: Facebook and all the marketeers who sail in her pretty much just want you to visit as many ad-bearing pages per visit as possible (that’s what all those applications and invites are for), and having lost your eyeballs, they’d quite like to keep the data that can be mined from those activities. So they’re going to make it as difficult as possible to scrub that data out of the system. Can you guess how much that softens my heart toward the company?

Mark Evan’s compares his relationship with facebook as a kind of ‘amour fou’ that has run its course.

At first, the romance was hot and heavy…It was a lusty, unhealthy affair that made me crazy but you know how lust consumes you…You know that awkward feeling when you’re dating someone, and the romance starts to fade? …I feel that way about Facebook these days…Truth be told, I’ve found someone else - younger, sexier, more streamlined: Twitter. Yet, I’m not as enraptured with Twitter as I once was with Facebook, which is a good sign.

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We’ve known the future has been coming for a while but we never really expected it to come so soon.  Recently, we saw traffic to Bebo overtake traffic to Google in Ireland.  Now, we have this report from EContent matter-of-factly presenting a compliation of expert opinion stating that social networking sites ‘are replacing search as the interface to content’.

Just as search has become the de facto interface to content on the web, so have social networks become the entry-point to a much greater and richer internet experience. The Hitwise study revealed the impact that social sites have had in driving traffic to other destinations on the web. Shopping and classified sites, for instance, received 2.4% of their visits directly from MySpace in September 2006—an 83% increase since March.

Against this backdrop, social networking has become a significant force on the web and a part of users’ daily lives, observes Outsell’s Doctor. “The sites are replacing search as the interface to content.”

And, 

Despite the variety of [user generated content] flourishing on the internet, the range of business models and strategies is limited by a lack of imagination and vision.

The basic concept and architecture behind online social networks like bebo, myspace, facebook etc are indistinguishable  from one another and fundamentally indistinguishable from the originals like sixdegrees and friendster.  Some have said that if sixdegrees and friendster were the invention of the automobile, then myspace et al. would be equivalent to the model-T ford.   

All of this leads one to suggest that there remains a lot of opportunity for the innovative in this space. 

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At etech 2006, danah boyd gave what Kathy Sierra called an astonishing talk.  It ended with this definition of an intriguing problem.  

Is anyone aware of any solutions to this problem going public in the last year or even in the near future?

Provide the cultural environment where people can accidentally connect with strangers over meaningful things without being forced to face everyone on the system. Let users privatize or wall off access to only certain people for their own needs. Let users see the values of being public. Of course, balancing privacy needs with public possibilities with the lack of interest in dealing with the *whole* public is quite tricky. Anyone who can solve this design challenge with a robust system will win the hearts of users and investors.

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