Instagram Stalkers

Okay, before anything else: If you’re one of those people whose Facebook profile pic is you looking into your webcam all bemused like you’re somehow above everyone else, you need to change that. Immediately. You are despised by everyone, and by me most of all.

Thanks, I feel better now. On with today’s post…

Facebook is a very convenient way to keep up with people you know, or don’t — if they’ve no other presence online. If they do you need to find where they live and hang with them there. Seriously.

It would be very convenient for me to blame my love/hate relationship with Facebook on my particular set of friends — most of whom are working the Toronto comedy racket and have been known to derail a serious conversation or two with a witty rejoinder, or jam the airwaves altogether with a shameless marketing campaign for a live appearance. But really, they’re only behaving in accordance to the customs of their tribe. And like any other social network there are many tribes on many islands, each with rules and regulations to call their own.

The problem with Facebook isn’t its users — it’s that Facebook is a terrible experience by design.

Data Porta-non-ability.

As Facebook is so popular, it’s the best (i.e. worst) example of the “you make it, we own it” Web 2.0 business model. I’m “Facebook friends” with many a blogger who regularly republish their posts on Fb and get lots of comments there, while the site that begat this discussion in the first place lingers in silence, barren of feedback. That ain’t right.

Of course you could manually copy, timestamp   and paste comments from Facebook onto your own blog, but you shouldn’t have to. Sadly, that seems to be your only option — I can’t even get the RSS feeds for my posted content and statuses to work.

In fact, about the only thing you can count on making it out of Facebook is your sensitive user data, like that email address you use to log in, for example.

Those stupid, stupid apps.

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