Ryan Block is an uber cool guy. He’s the reason I started reading Engadget back in the day. I love his Apple Events Coverage at Engadget and at GDGT. Ryan and I have chatted at events and I wasn’t aware of his departure from Facebook and Instagram. The entire article on NYTimes is a VERY VERY good read! Read the whole thing here. I am posting a few choice bits below:
Facebook’s legendarily fast and loose approach to user privacy has long been something of a cliché, which is why deleting one’s account is now something of a hollow techno-political statement – the Internet equivalent to moving off the grid to a cabin in the mountains. And it’s certainly not as if Facebook has much to worry about, as no number of high-profile abandoners over the last two years have slowed the company’s ballooning growth, now at over a billion active users.
I’m absolutely over the up in arms way users petition services who make design or terms of service changes. Startups evolve and they do this often especially when the startup is not charging users for the service. To make money, which is a necessary reality to almost every startup, the TOS and user experience must evolve. That’s just the way it is. I admit that a lot of users close accounts just to prove a point which I’ve always disagreed with. I don’t close accounts if I can help it and, if I do, it’s not to prove a point. It’s because the company continually lost my trust with decisions that are made to appease their customers…advertisers or data buyers. If the users are the customers, most of the time this doesn’t happen.
In my search for technology products and services that somehow enrich or add value to my life, Facebook and Instagram have been a net negative not only in their usefulness, but also in other, subtle ways most people don’t often consider.
I agree with this. Instagram I used for a couple of days this year and found it interesting that I had 900 followers on it before ever posting a single picture. I have 1500 friends on Facebook + about 100 subscribers. These days, I use Facebook for syndication. I look at my friends list and subscribers all as subscribers. Facebook I’ve thought of deleting but my clickthroughs of photos and blog posts are pretty healthy on Facebook. In addition, almost eery personal conversation I have with friends and family happens on Facebook. No one uses my email anymore. They message me on Facebook. So I have to keep it around. Instagram was a nice syndication but I felt taking photos with my camera, copying them to my phone’s camera roll and uploading to Instagram with the tag #NoFilter was too much work. I’d prefer that all who are interested in my photos go to Flickr which is where I’ve been uploading photos since 2007.
Beyond syndication, Ryan’s point is right. Maybe he and I are in agreement because we simply have too many connections on social networks? My friends like Lee who aren’t tech savvy and only have 100 friends on Facebook say my issues are not their issues. They get a lot out of social networks because only real life friends are there. This is a point I’d like to experiment with but don’t have the guts to rip out everyone I’m not friends with from my social networks.
A decade ago, I joined one of the early social networking sites, Friendster, which struggled to find a business model and eventually collapsed as users migrated to MySpace. In the intervening years, Friendster’s brand, intellectual property (including some seminal social networking patents), and most important, user data from millions of people, were broken up or changed hands.
This is perhaps the most scary thing that I haven’t put a lot of time into. From 2005-2009, I joined every social network to preserve the username. Now, I decide really hard what I want to get out of each network that gets my email address. I have no idea what data is out there in sites that went defunct and sold the data to all kinds of companies.
Perhaps worst of all, in an era where we meticulously prune our online personae, services like Facebook require constant diligence and maintenance. On Twitter accounts, About.me profiles, or LinkedIn bios, at the very least users are empowered by complete control in their outward appearance. This is in contrast to Facebook and any other social tool that allows any user in its social graph to associate you with all manner of unrelated career- (or even potentially life-) changing posts or images.
THIS is a profound thought and something I’ve argued on Twitter each time an Instagram-esque debacle happens. The argument I make is that we spend a lot of free time maintaining social networks with our latest profile photos, bios and syndicating status updates and photo uploads to appease small groups of followers that almost always overlap when it comes to a few social networks. We user services like Ping.FM to syndicate our thoughts and waste time keeping our finger on all of it for no reason.
So many friends of mine say they can’t maintain a blog. They’re too busy to do that. Then quit all social networks that you don’t absolutely need and that have no value in your life. Twitter is the only network I maintain. LikedIN I check once a month and Facebook I use to keep track of Beer news, email friends and syndicate my photos & blog posts. Twitter is more like a personal life diary that others subscribe to so I keep using it.
We’re wasting a lot of time curating our social existence to companies that don’t value us and only value our data. We’re handing over data for free to companies to do with it what they want. It’s a waste of time. We may as well be watching reality TV all day.
We’d all be much better off simplifying our technological footprints and consolidating our trust in the few services that provide us the greatest value with the fewest unintended side effects. In the end, I’m not afraid to admit it. I’m a quitter.
Good on Ryan for posting this.
I challenge everyone in the new year to own their content. Use services that charge you money and promise to you, its users that they won’t sell your data, won’t delete your content and, if they go away, will give you the data you gave them in a standard format. Google, Facebook and Twitter support data portability but they still serve advertisers. They’re in what I call a grey area of social networks worth putting up with. Unfortunately, the mass use of these companies + data portability makes me stick around. Others aren’t so lucky. If you don’t allow me access to my data off-site, don’t’ take my money and aren’t a mass used social tool, I simply won’t sign up or give you my information.
We should all take a stand and force freemium startups to take our money and serve the users. This would mean less startups but it would bring up the ecosystem of quality tools that respect the end user and not the advertiser. Who’s with me?