michael pucher

 Time to quit facebook (and other “social” networks)

Today I’ve erased all my private and identity data (memberships of formerly called fan pages and groups) from facebook. I’ve also removed the facebook “like” button from this blog. The next logic step will be to delete my facebook account (link). And you should do the same.

What’s wrong with facebook?

Nothing special. If it were not facebook it would be something else. There are two ways to operate/monetize a centralized web platform like facebook:

1. paid accounts
2. advertising and selling profile data/statistics

Both have major shortages:

1. paid accounts won’t scale that much. Users aren’t willing to pay because they already pay for internet access
2. annoys users, may violate privacy and law

Those two issues aren’t even the biggest issue with facebook. With the introduction of the latest technologies like “universal like” or “open graph api” the whole open minded web is in danger. Imaging the following: you’re logged in into facebook (or even worse: you have to be logged in to facebook to access certain sites of the web, what is already happening) and your private data and what you like on facebook is shared with third parties (like pandora or yelp). Your music preferences, what movies you liked and so on. More and more websites will use the information what you like from facebook. Every webpage is then fitted to your “likes” and preferences based on the pages you like on facebook. You won’t be able to explore stuff, it’s all waiting prepared for you. Maybe you’ll find that useful. I’m afraid thinking about it. We will lose the ability to explore the formerly open internet on our own mind. In exchange we will get a close, vendor-optimized web where we are in a bad position. All we need to do is to click the “buy now” button.

twitter isn’t in a better situation right now. The only way to monetize/pay operation costs has been to introduce “promoted tweets”. They will fail as well. Either people will leave twitter due too annoyance or smart people will find ways to filter promoted tweets (and people will find ways).

The internet is becoming all about marketing and sales. The so called “social networks” the public now knows are not “social” networks. Those are becoming “marketing” and “targeting” networks more and more every day. And we provide all the information to fill their databases on your on. By own will.

That’s the dilemma of centralized networks/platforms. The only way to pay the operating costs and earn some money is to sell out.

Smart people are already leaving facebook (like here and there) and look for new ways to create open, decentraliced or commercial alternatives.

Both open source and commercial offerings have two things in common: they bet on decentralized, open infrastructures and respect individual rights and privacy. There are indeed huge technical and operational issues to overcome before a decentralized, open source and individual rights protecting social networking will become possible. But it will. Smart people are working hard to find ways already.

facebook (and others) will fail.