The assertion that Facebook can protect its market leading position by entering into the smaller-is-bigger philosophy or going async (a la Twitter) is nifty, but not the answer to “what’s wrong on the Internet”.
After reading Dave McClure’s post, subtitled “How to Take Down Facebook”, I think that, between all the f-bombs and Generation Z three-letter acronyms, Dave makes a few good points. For example, Twitter is better for following famous people (to which I would counter, Facebook is better for enabling fame).
Dave wants to see Facebook become an enabler of more private communities. To his burrito point, we could say that Facebook alerady does this through threaded, instant mail messaging. We could also respond to his friend overload point that perhaps Dave doesn’t know how to manage his profile privacy settings, or that perhaps Dave should start a Fan Page and whittle down his friend relationships to the bare essentials.
Bottom line is, true intimacy in relationships cannot be fostered by an inorganic structure like Facebook, in my opinion. Intimacy is about mutual experiences, not a mutual sounding board. We all have telephones–does this make us more intimate in our relationships than when we’re together, shoulder-to-shoulder, or working on the same outcome as a team? Hardly. Facebook is merely a platform for communication, and while it plays a role in enabling quality relationships, it is certainly a subserviant role.
My advice to Dave McClure is, you probably don’t have 2000 actual friends, so fix it. Delete. Delete. Delete.
But to give up those synchronous connections on Facebook is to give up the influence that comes with having a large audience. And herein lies the real challenge, if I can rephrase what Dave is saying here into something a little more succinct: Facebook is mediocre at protecting the privacy of celebrities, while Twitter is very good.
The effect of this can be seen in Facebook’s inability to provide more intimate connections, and in Twitter’s ability to prevent celebrities from having to spill anything more than they’d like to on their profile.
