Another bad week for social networking in general and Facebook especially? Reading blog entries from Nico and Wolfgang, a heavily discussed Facebook post by moeffju plus the Business Insider piece “Facebook is a fundamentally broken product” one might get the idea that social networks have failed us, betrayed us and we should therefore draw consequences, like going away or praying for a better social network.
I think that’s rubbish.
When you throw more information into a system it gets fuzzier. End. Of. Story. And if you think technology is there to solve it you’re wrong. It might. In the future. Not even Amazon has it worked out, their recommendations engine breaks once you have more than 100 orders or so, just because of the variance from your ideal you.
Sorry, but when you have 5000 Twitter followers or 700 Facebook friends and complain that your experience sucks it’s just your own fault. You throw crap into the system you’ll get crap out.
The BI article argues Facebook fails us in not finding a good way to show 1,500 messages a day. 1,500 messages? Are you reading what you’re arguing? Who’d want to read that? Who in his right mind announces proudly “whoopee, inbox-zero” on the one hand and puts himself into such a mess on the other? (aside from social media experts who claim they “have to do this for work”)
I like Wolfgang’s piece because he seems well aware of the dilemma and shares how he uses social networks. I am not going to bore you with my take on it, let’s just say that I know where to find what interests me and what interests me finds me in reverse. And I sleep well knowing that I will miss things, life’s just too short to worry about that one rig rundown video on YouTube I didn’t see.
And I know. I still spend too much time on Facebook. But at least I know all the people there join my conversation regularly and I like them to do that. Because that is my criteria for adding people. And seriously, sometimes even 200 is too much.
On a final note let me remind you that this is “network is broken dilemma” is neither new nor is it the right argument. Go back in time 5 years and you’ll remember Robert Scoble had this figured out already, doing the big “unfollow-everybody and start over” with his RSS subscriptions and later with Twitter because it was too much to handle.
Let’s be real and acknowledge too much information breaks the system and it’s your job to limit the amount and quality of the input.
Put rubbish in and you’ll get rubbish out.
