Thursday, March 05, 2009

Facebook v. Twitter?

OK, so Facebook tried to buy Twitter, got rejected, and is now implementing "Twitter-like" functionality to compete.

Not selling may have been a bad move on Twitter's part. Prospective buyers keep piling huge offers in front of them and they keep rejecting those offers even though they apparently don't yet have a plan for making money with the thing themselves.

On the other hand, on a personal level, screw Facebook's new "Twitter-like" functionality. It's just one more kitchen sink piled on top of a goddamn landfill full of kitchen sinks.

I've tried hard to like Facebook, and sometimes I succeed for awhile. Usually about the time I succeed in making the place enjoyably manageable for my purposes, they back another truckload of kitchen sinks up to their unloading docks, hit the "dump" button, and make the place more trouble than it's worth to navigate for another month.

I like the whole "friends network" thing. I like the walls. I like the groups and the causes. If Facebook would just quit burying me under nudges and bumps and gadgets and games and karma and houseplants and gangsters and vampires and zombies and whatnot, I'd use it more. I use it daily for the groups; once a week or so I do other things like vetting friend requests, inspecting cause and event invitations, etc.; once a month or so I go in with a bulldozer, clean the garbage out of my piece of the place, and start using it daily again ... until the next deluge.

I'm not willing to put up with Facebook's entropy-increasing presence being constantly open in my browser or through some mediating app in order to get "Twitter-like" functionality. I'll use Twitter for that functionality, and Insha'Allah it will remain a fairly simple service that does the three or four things it does well instead of constantly piling on new and increasingly bizarre stuff.

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