To Like or Unlike Facebook

To like Facebook is easy.  Just click a button and get apps,  uploads, and quick feedback from friends everywhere.  Each day, facebookers post messages and photos on their web pages with instant access to friends and millions of users around the globe.

 

But, is it time to unlike Facebook?

  

In some ways, last year was a watershed year for Facebook, with one billion users world wide, a public stock offering, and a new advertising model.  The future is now!  

In the United States, however, it's popularity has already peaked.  2012 was the first year that Facebook users in the U.S. began to decline each month, beginning in April when 6 million fewer Americans had Facebook accounts.  In developing markets and emerging economies, world-wide growth continues, but that's not the case in the U.S. and other developed countries like Australia, where fewer users are participating in the Facebook experience.

It seems these users have already decided that Facebook is much ado about nothing.

For many years I avoided creating an account, resisting my friends and neighbors' invitations to join the Zuckerberg Revolution.  I didn't buy it, and I'm not sure I buy it now, having signed up for an account late last year.  

True, its an extremely convenient interface that makes it so easy to share stuff with people you know, and those you haven't known since high school.

In 2003, when many internet users were seeking an on line presence, Mark Zuckerberg made it easy to claim a spot on the World Wide Web, as we used to call it.  It was a time when few people could design or construct, much less host, their own website. Zuckerberg made it easy to establish an internet presence to connect with friends, quickly.

Okay... that's cool!

Back in March, 1997 I created my first web page on a little known (and now defunct) site called FreeWeb Page. I started with my own music memories and then developed a page on GeoCities called Cattle Drive.  It was a site dedicated to the Marshall Tucker Band called Searchin' For A Rainbow.  I remember spending an entire week learning to write html, scanning photos, and uploading files. The next year, I was hired as the first webmaster of the band's official website, marshalltucker.com.

Websites are websites, and in the end I've had my share.  So for me, Facebook is just another version of a  website; its just on a different scale.

To be sure, the most useful aspect of Facebook has been its role in establishing a web presence for social and global causes.

In 2010, the Arab Spring began as an uprising in Egypt that spread throughout Northern Africa and the Middle East with the aid of Facebook.  Without a doubt, Social Media has helped fan the flames of resistance in cultures that have been closed to free speech and an open media, and it's likely to continue.  But, for the rest of us, what does Facebook really mean?

What is a Facebook account?  Is it a class reunion?  A family gathering place to lol with friends?  Or, is it merely a photo sharing service for others to lurk, like, and comment on?

I'm not really sure what to think of it all, but I do know this: there's really not much substance on Facebook.  Where is the content?  Where is the discourse, the discussion?  At this point, I don't believe it will ever replace the relevancy of email... the insights of blogging... or the commentary and in-depth content of many websites already on the internet today.  

So, who knows.  In the end, It may be time to move on to the next big thing.

It might be time to unlike Facebook.