The Facebook Experiment

So after years of denying my need for this little website, I finally joined Facebook. The main reason was that here in the UK it seems to be an even more integral part of society than it already is in Germany. Particularly smaller organizations seem to use it as their primary communications channel. One of these is our daughter's pony club. For the first few months I denied a need to open a Facebook account - after all, my beloved wife already had one and was making good use of it. However, at some point I realised there may be a benefit in being notified directly without her having to act as relay.

So now I'm on Facebook. I already added a few people I came across in my life - in some cases they had sent me invitations years ago, and FB had still stored these!

My first impression is not to good though.  I've been on LinkedIn and GooglePlus for several years now, and I must say that I absolutely miss a practical way of categorizing my connections. When it started, Plus war praised for its "Circles". LinkedIn offers the option of associating connections with "tags" - not quite as user friendly as the circles, but still works quite well. And this makes a lot of sense. All of us are part of different groups that most often share only one individual as their common denominator - yourself. I think the sociological term for this is "peer groups". I wouldn't want to share a pony club story with everyone I went to school with 20 years ago.

Plus (maybe this is a German thing) I don't think of all of my connections as friends. Many are really only acquaintances that I still like to stay on contact with - not the same as a friend with whom I share more personal things. When you share something with all your Facebook "friends", you may as well just share it publicly. It makes no practical difference.

I know that Facebook has friends lists (and I already started filling them), but these are by far not as easy to use as the Plus circles or the LinkedIn tags. Most of the time, when you think of a person, you associate them with a group through which you know them - not the other way around. On to of that, many of your connections belong to several categories. One example: Over the course of my life, I've been a member of several chess clubs. So, naturally, I met a lot of different people in this way. I have a category for the Werder Bremen Chess department, another one for the Hamburg Chess Club of 1830, one for SC Königsspringer Alzenau and so on. All of these connections are part of the overall category "chess", some are friends, some are close friends, many rather count as acquaintances. So in technical terms your personal connections form an "m:n relationship". Plus and LinkedIn reflect this reality quite closely. Facebook still doesn't - years after Plus went live. I remember that at that time the circles were absolutely hyped - now I understand why. This is really a very basic functionality.

In terms of other aspects, let's just say that I only started over the weekend. However, so far I haven't found anything which makes Facebook superior to Plus - speaking from a functional point of view. (I know the user base is supposedly larger.)

So apart from a decent categorization functionality, I haven't found real difference between Facebook and Plus. Please let me know your opinions on this. And please try to be objective. No fanboy flamewars...