Missing the Forest for the Minor Flaws in the Implementation of Mini-Feed

Industry Interactive says that facebook is "pretty good for the beginners, but fails for [tech-savvy] people like me." His points, my thoughtss:

1) Facebook is great at connecting people. It’s the first “social network” that I’ve ever bothered to use. I was able to find people I went to elementary school with, identify them, and connect.

Well, yeah. Good point.

2)Facebook sucks at playing well with others. There are Facebook Apps to integrate things like Flickr and del.icio.us, but they really blow, and why isn’t Facebook building that functionality right in anyways? My prime example is that the only way I can integrate my blog posts into Facebook is by importing them as notes. This starts an entirely separate conversation thread, instead of just letting the conversation take place on my blog. This is the dumbest implementation I’ve ever experienced.

Just like Myspace, friendster, yahoo! 360, orkut, and all of the other failed social networking services have perfectly integrated third-party and web 2.0 applications. Facebook may not be perfect, but before it came around, unless your friends used RSS readers or checked your Livejournal, flickr, and Myspace pages religiously, they'd never see what was going on in your fake internet life. Facebook actually just added integration of flickr, digg, youtube, and a shit-ton of other stuff into mini-feed, so while it's got room to develop, it's still tops in terms of integrating a bunch of services into one place.

3) Facebook does a lot of it’s peripheral stuff very poorly. The photo albums? Crap compared to Flickr or Picasa. Messaging? How many people prefer dumbass Facebook messaging to e-mail?

Clearly this guy doesn't hang out with hot chicks. If he did, he would take pictures with them, tag himself in those photos, and feel like a badass. He makes the point that he hates having to upload photos in two places (flickr and facebook). I don't mind it in the slightest. Flickr is the place for carefully shot and processed photos. Strangers browse galleries and comment on them. The community is about sharing art.Facebook is not flickr, it never tried to be. It's a SOCIAL application, and the photo function serves that purpose well. You take photos with your friends in them, tag them, and let a graphical representation of your life emerge. It's not facebook's fault this guy's friends are ugly.

4) Facebook is turning into AOL circa 1995 in trying to build their own private little Internet (except they have a platform!) It’s pretty crappy trying to get your data in or out of Facebook.

Easy to get data in (through apps or mini-feed import you can bring in basically any RSS feed, and you can upload photos, grab contacts from email accounts, etc.). It does suck getting it out, but most of the time, I don't need to. Facebook is not a place for intense, mission-critical academic or business work. I'm not all like, "Oh shit! I did my final project in a wall-to-wall with my friend, and now I can't export it!" or "Why won't Microsoft Outlook sync itself to all these beer pong tournaments?". Really? What data is living on facebook that you so badly need to grab?

This post is what happens when adults hear about something that's a big part of a lot of students' lives, try it out, realize its domain of applicability doesn't quite match their lifestyles, and therefore say it's a bad thing. If you took away the crude humor, superficial conversation, and vouyerism, Facebook would probably get boring, and maybe that's the reason it doesn't appeal to an adult, married man, but it is a huge, thriving community, it works with other services better than almost anything out there, and it's constantly updated based on user input. I guess I recognize a couple of his tech-oriented frustrations, but I'm too busy being amazed by the badass feed imports, draggable profile boxes, chat system, and photo tagging to care.

Full Industry Interactive post here; props to Brooke for finding it.