While I’m waiting for CentOS to install on my puppet test box for the 289387th time this month, I’m taking a minute to think out loud about social networking.

My girlfriend, whom I adore, is not quite a neo-Luddite, but she is a hippie girl who cares not even a little bit about the newest hot thing on the Internet, whatever that happens to be at the time. I admire this trait. It means we run in different circles when it comes to technology, since at this point I can safely say I’m never going offline, but we have enough overlap on the Internet that it doesn’t really affect things. The only exception to this is Facebook.

I recently opened a Facebook account to test a Facebook application that my company published. The app wasn’t working and I needed to get an “outside” view of it, so I popped open a Web browser window, ran through the account setup, tested my app, and all was well. Over lunch that day, out of curiosity, I started poking around Facebook to see what it was like. I’m not generally up on the latest social networking sites, mostly due to appalling lack of giving a shit, so I had no idea what to expect. (I have a MySpace page solely to keep up with my sister’s blog while she’s in Iraq; I don’t think that counts.) To my dismay, due to my not paying close attention when I went through the account setup, Facebook had sent a friend request to everyone in my address book who already has a Facebook account, so now everyone I know is pinging me on Facebook to say hi. Which would be fine if I were interested in utilizing Facebook as a new social networking utility, but… that wasn’t why I set up the account.

So anyway, I started poking around and seeing who I knew. I found out my brother has a Facebook account; I had no idea. (We don’t really speak.) I found out that a lot of people from chorus have accounts. I played around with a couple of apps, futzed around with my profile, uploaded a picture… the usual bullshit people do when they’re playing with a new toy. In no time at all I had 25 “friends”, mostly people I keep up with in real life, but a couple of people from high school as well, and now I have a “poke” from someone I don’t even know. It didn’t take long for it to get out of my control. I’ll be honest; I was enamored of Facebook for a few days. Social networking sites are not just a way to keep in touch with people; they’re also extremely self-indulgent. In a few clicks you can tell the world your mood, what music you’re hearing, what you’re doing at that very moment, the movies you like, how knowledgeable you are about any number of subjects, and your popularity rating (measured by how many “friends” you have). It’s easy to get seduced by the self-centric nature of these Web sites.

Back to my girlfriend. She Who Does Not Do the Internet (except a little) can’t stand MySpace, Facebook, or any site like them. And she got irritated that I had a Facebook account, because, she said, it’s hard enough to keep up with me online considering how little she likes to be online in the first place. She feels like she misses enough of my life while I’m online and at work and Facebook is just another thing that she doesn’t want to keep up with and that will scatter me all over the Internet even more than I am now.

It’s a good point, I have to say.

Not that I wasn’t already, but this set me to some serious thinking about the whole social networking site thing, specifically about this little Facebook world into which I’d somehow fallen. Honestly, as social networking sites go, Facebook isn’t bad. The interface is clean and easy to use, and the default privacy setting of a user’s profile is much better than at MySpace, which by default leaves profiles wide open for any manner of weirdos and creeps to see. But still… after thinking it over even for a few minutes, I realized I just… don’t get the point.

Really, I don’t. I understand that people want to keep up with each other. I get that it helps other people stay in touch. But the people with whom I want to stay in touch in other ways, like phone or e-mail or whatever… I already do that. Facebook doesn’t even have a blog feature that I can tell. For business networking, LinkedIn is much more appropriate than Facebook. All I have seen on Facebook so far is people poking each other, challenging each other to quizzes, throwing fish at each other, and trying to make each other into vampires. In other words, it’s the same pointless meme crap that populates 95% of the Web, all concentrated in one place. I have been trying for a couple of weeks now to figure out what Facebook offers that’s unique or useful, and, at least for me, I can’t see it.

I won’t even go into the social complications that come with “friending” people online when you’re not that close in real life. I have enough trouble remembering the rules for normal social interaction without throwing weird online communities into the mix.

So anyway, all this is just to say that I think I’m going to deactivate my Facebook account. Not because my girl doesn’t like it, and not because I want to avoid people from my real life, but because I just don’t… see the point. It’s a time-waster, and I have enough of those already in my life.

A really good article that talks about this same aspect of SNS is here. Enjoy the read.