The great facebook purge.
So I’m sitting here reading about what will be my new mobile operating system and I hear all these reviewers talk about the facebook integration. They keep talking about all these people they don’t care about popping up on their hubs. At first I thought this was a major problem with Microsoft’s new mobile OS. What I realized after some pondering is there is a problem you you facebook whores out there. Why the hell do you have 800 facebook friends on your personal page. You can’t possible care and or talk to that many people and if you do it’s for marketing purposes because you’re a musical artist or something of that nature and would probably not use it for your phone anyway, but your average schmoe has no need for that sort of social connection.
Some of you are going to say that it’s helped you connect with old friends from high school or college or whatever. I don’t know how you could have lived without talking to these people again. Why the hell didn’t you talk to these people before facebook? Why don’t you still talk to these people from high school? Because you don’t care about them. If you need facebook to reaffirm some sort of social inadequacy to feel like you have a lot of friends then I hope you never rely on your facebook social ring in a tight squeeze. Despite the rhetoric involved with linking two peoples profiles in an online social networking site these people are very often not your “friends” in the strictest sense of the word. So I went through and deleted more than half of the people on my facebook friends list down to people that are really my friends. Will this cause some major backlash in the fabric of my own personal social network? I doubt it. I’d be really surprised if any of the people I deleted even mention it or attempt to re”friend” me. I’m also interested in seeing how long it takes for them to get the hint.
So you people hopping on the Windows Phone wagon tell me, What are you going to do about your excessive facebook overflow? Are you going to grin and bear it, avoiding that section of your phone on a daily basis for fear of seeing that fat ugly relative that enjoys wearing revealing clothing? Or will you go through and bury this link to pointless acquaintances from your past that have no idea you’re even still alive? For me I’ve gone from over 200 friends to less than 90. I wasn’t that popular to begin with and turns out nothing has changed. 🙂
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Well they did change the settings in WP so that it only displays contents in the HUB if they are FB friends and you have them saved in a content. Putting that aside, I’m not on FB but I’m considering it so I can talk to people even less…man that’ll be sweet! 🙂
Greg Hillensbeck likes your post.
very true matt, and yes like DavidK said, facebook filter FTW 😛
I have always been excited about the deep FB integration, but I think it should be possible to switch it off completely. Or even better – uninstalled.
What if WP7 was released 5 years ago? Then there would have been deep integration to “Second Life”! And what would that have done for us now? Absolutely nothing! (Except that it might have given Second Life a brighter future)
So I am thinking about, what is up and what is down in the social media 2 years from now. Facebook may still be the leader, but we don’t know.
On the other hand… what the hell. 2 years from now we will most likely talk about WP8 with its endless list of features, so I guess that MS is doing the best thing possible right now.
And regarding your 200 turned 90 friends – I love it 🙂
I don’t use facebook.
like david said…the change to only display updates from people in your contact list is there. but we all know i am a facebook whore…so i want to see everyone! 🙂
@Everyone talking about contacts – I was referring to the shit storm of an experience it would be to look through the photos hub with all those facebook friends. There doesn’t seem to be a way to filter those out regardless of contacts…
I like having specific control over my online integration or the information that’s stored in ‘the cloud.’ I always meet talk of deep integration with a mixture of skepticism and apprehension.
On another note, some people with many friends are semi-public figures, whose employment or social role brings them into contact with a lot of different people on a regular basis and who are benefited by having an easy means (like Facebook) to interact with even these less-intimate friends. If this interaction is primarily of a personal nature, it’s more fitting to ‘friend’ them than to invite them to ‘fan’ a public page like a musical artist might. Not everyone with 800+ ‘friends’ is an attention whore or Facebook addict–although many might be. Still, I agree that so many FB friends makes information filtering a strict necessity–especially on a phone. Hence, my former comments.
Matt, I appreciate your point of view regarding how you define your online connections, and I applaud you for saying it.
However, I think you’re missing a key point.
We’re on the cusp of a different Age of Information, where it’s not just what you can find, but what your network pushes to you.
Yes, you don’t talk to those pricks in high school who didn’t invite you to parties, but they STILL have more relevance to you years later than complete strangers do. When many of them “Like” something or are collectively affected by an event, the odds of that item having meaning for *you* are ever-so-slightly enhanced.
Those little bits add up, over time. NO ONE expects you to track down every status update of every person. And I am not advocating building a network just for the sake of adding people. It’s building a network that brings relevance. (It’s not just your Windows Phone, either… it’s also working into your search engine results. And it won’t just be Facebook, it will be all of your social graphs.)
I don’t intend to convert you — again, I applaud you for drawing your line and being consistent with it.
I just ask that you stop flaming the rest of us, because it’s clear you don’t really understand how we’re using Facebook. (If you attend a decent-sized church, it’s not uncommon to have 200-300 people right there.)
All that said, I agree with you about the WP7/FB integration. For it to work for me, I would want to limit it to pull from a specific Facebook List of “Phone” people. The rest I can get from a mobile browser if I need to.