Richard posts about a friend who abandoned Facebook because he was uncomfortable with the idea of reconnecting with certain people from his past- particularly old girlfriends.  His friend, who is in his twenties, also questioned the Twitter-like vibe that occurs when friends who transcend life eras start firing off a cycle of cheeky notes for the connected world to read.

I think this raises a very interesting issue.  To what extent do people over thirty (much less over forty or fifty) really want to open their current lives up to their past?  In theory, I would love to reconnect with some old friends.  In practice, however, I am a poor correspondent who has lost touch with virtually all of my high school, college and graduate school friends.  It’s one thing to post away out here in the giant ocean that is the blogosphere.  Few of my old friends swim in that ocean.  I get occasional emails from people I have lost touch with, but that’s about it.  It’s another thing altogether to place a billboard on the virtual street where my old friends drive saying “this way to Kent Newsome’s current life.”

With Facebook and, even more so for grownups, LinkedIn, the whole purpose of joining is to make connections with old and new friends.  The total number of my high school and college friends who have Facebook accounts is zero.  Nada.  Zilch.  So being on Facebook or visiting MySpace is like wandering through my kids’ rooms when their friends are over: it’s chaotic, I don’t really understand what they’re doing, but I can tell they are having fun.  On the other hand, LinkedIn is like a stroll through my old neighborhoods.  I got an email from a college friend within minutes of signing up at LinkedIn the other night.  And I found teens, if not a hundred or so, college and graduate school classmates who I can reach out to.  If I want to.

It’s hard to explain, but being in Facebook and LinkedIn seems materially more exposed than merely posting away on a blog.  It’s like that dream where you realize you are back in some class, with no clothes on.  With nowhere to hide.

Richard says:

I have a feeling that most people in the mainstream who are now just starting to generate and publish (however inadvertently) things on the net, don’t really get the potential permanence of it.

Mix Facebook or MySpace with the fearlessness and the ephemeral nature of youth, and you can end up with a permanent online record that loses its swagger with the passage of time.

And even if your life appears boring, once you put it out there for the connected world to see, don’t you lose control of it a little?

My current life is one of blissful, family based routine- the sort of thing I would have found unimaginable at twenty.  And the sort of thing I find perfectly wonderful in my forties.  I am much less social, online and off, than I was when I was younger.  So while I am interested in catching up with old friends, there is something a little scary about these social networking applications.

I guess I just feel more comfortable out here in the wilderness.

I have a genuine question.

What is so much better about Facebook (and MySpace and other similar platforms) than an ordinary blog on a popular platform- say WordPress?

I would love it if someone could explain this to me.

To this point, I’ve always felt like the blogosphere is the only social network that matters, and that Facebook, etc. are the dilutive sandboxes of the new Geocities generation.  But I am obviously missing something.  Just look at tonight’s Techmeme.

I understand how it’s better for the owners of Facebook, because they can sell ads and leverage off of the content and traffic created by users.

But I don’t get it at all from the user’s perspective.

Can somebody help me with this?

Richard Querin on Facebook:

While I’ve only seen glimpses of Facebook, it just doesn’t seem like my type of thing. I may be wrong, but with the very limited glimpses I’ve seen of it and from what these guys have told me, it sounds like Classmates.com meets MySpace.

I’ve never used Facebook, but I have made the mistake of signing up for Classmates a time or two.  If ever there was a space that some ad-intoxicated Web 2.0 developer needs to enter and recreate, it’s the Classmates space.  Classmates may be the single most annoying web site ever.  I’d love to reconnect with some of my high school friends, but not if I have to suffer Classmates.com.

I have always thought that Facebook should remain the exclusive domain of college students.  On ACCBoards.Com, I have noticed that when a prized basketball or football recruit signs with a school, some zealous fan always tracks down his Facebook account.  Before you know it, this kid has a ton of new friends he’s never met, the large majority of which he will never meet.  Seems OK for college kids, but a little too stalkerish for grownups.  So even though they opened Facebook up, undoubtedly in pursuit of money, I cringe a little when I read about grownups using Facebook.

MySpace, on the other hand, has always seemed to me to be the new Geocities.  You know- the place where people with no web design skills can create profoundly ugly web pages and wait for people with their own profoundly ugly web pages to link to them.  Granted, it’s more feature rich than Geocities, but that has more to do with the passage of time than some evolutionary leap.  Most MySpace pages I have seen look just like the ones I remember seeing on Geocities back in the day.

Maybe it is age.  Maybe if I were younger, I’d be more into social and networking.  At this point, I’m not all that into either.  The funny thing is that neither are a lot of the people who claim these sites will change the world.  Most of them are just trying to make a buck.

Getting rich off of social networking.  I guess it beats Amway.

And hang it on the wall.

Kevin Briody on Facebook’s move to open its network to anyone:

This is a bad idea. A classic example of inappropriately twisting a business model to justify investor demands and market expectations.

Amen.

It’s another example of the completely out of whack scale (or lack thereof) in the Web 2.0 space.  Facebook gained a big advantage, a huge mindshare and an identity apart from the “me too” of social networking by doing one thing very, very well- connecting college students.

Facebook is now willing to toss away much of that advantage by opening its gates to everyone in a silly attempt to be MySpace.

One day someone is going to make descisions based on something other than trying to squeeze the last dollar from the mythical Web 2.0 buyer.

When that happens, it will be time to needlepoint again.

Tags: facebook, web 2.0

Download Squad is reporting that YouTube, taking a page out of Google’s playbook, has launched a service to compete, at least on some level, with Facebook.

Colleges on YouTube is a closed community for college students. You must have an .edu email address to join. College students who are already members of YouTube under another email address can confirm their .edu address and gain admission to the community.

The list of colleges is limited at the moment, but more colleges will be added soon, according to a note on the Colleges on YouTube page.

What remains to be seen is what features other than uploading and commenting on videos will be offered by YouTube. If the college site looks like the rest of YouTube, then it will be more of an addition to Facebook than a direct competitor. If more features are added, it may be game on.

I think it’s a clever move on YouTube’s part to try to expand its reach into the social networking space, particularly for college age kids and recent graduates, almost all of whom seem to have some online networking presence.

I suspect more will be revealed about YouTube’s new venture in the coming days.

Tags: youtube, facebook, social networking