It would appear that I am not the only one fed up with Facebook applications. I do like the social and interactivity that Facebook provides, however I am fed up with the super pokes, the zombies, the quizzes and so on…
Mashable undertook a poll of their readers and the resounding response was people were fed up with Facebook.
The results were a fairly resounding “yes.” In our most active poll ever, only 13% of you said that you are “Not At All” fed up with the social network and are still enjoying it just as much as when you signed up.
Does this mean we are seeing the decline of Facebook (as we did with Friendster) and seeing an opening for a new social networking site?
Are you fed up with Facebook?
What is going to be the next “thing” that will replace Facebook?
Can we still use Facebook for learning, or are our learners fed up too?
The trick would be to standardise the data that these sites store, or perhaps even standardise the method of accessing this data. I do not want to join MySpace to connect to “Friend A” because I despise MySpace.. I prefer say “LastFM” but “Friend B” doesn’t listen to that much music, she’s quite into Vampire Slaying on Facebook.. and to be honest I don’t really dig that either. Perhaps you don’t have any time for any of these services at all but you do have your WordPress Blog so you’d like to connect to “Friend A”, “Friend B” and myself (all using different “products”) so you use a method of connection within WordPress (perhaps one of their gazillion plugins) that recognises the wee bit of data that says you want to be friends with A, B and Me. That’s the way forward, that’s the next big thing. The person that writes this also gets the not inconsiderable honour of becoming my hero. Unless of course he/she insists on bombarding me with advertising,
In addition to the above, there should be no technical reason why we could not add our Moodle’s to the list of services/products that we could connect via.
The only real issue there would be specific policies within institutions and of course rules that are in place to protect minors.
I just think we’re on the way down on the Facebook-Hype Curve.
When I started on FACEBOOK I spent a great deal of time trying to up my priarte rating and bite friends. Now, I hardly touch facebook, checking it mainly as a “first base” aggregator of all my other Web 2.0 tools. Most of the friends I bit when I first started do the same. Meanwhile, friends I have who are new to FACEBOOK continue to bombard me with Zombie applications. However, you can now block applications and just click ignore on all the others. It takes less than a minute a day of my time and, occasionally, something comes up that I like (such as Scrabble games, battleships etc).
As more people settle into facebook and the hype curve levels out, Zombies will decrease and, apart from a few good natured SuperPokes, we’ll see it more as a social tool again.
@Gary. I haven’t really got a problem with using different social networks for different things and meeting up with different people. What I dislike is the need to have a different profile on every single one – I want one single profile that gets imported into all the different networks I use so when I go to one I haven’t used for a while I don’t have to spend time upating my profile and thinking about which one I updated last.
Ali – It’s kind of where I was going, think I just got carried away with examples. The idea is for “you” to have a single source of data that was compatible with everything and there would be no particular need to sign up and create another profile anywhere, you’d just connect your data to the data of your “buddies” of choice regardless of the platform/service. You would “allow” Facebookers, LastFm users, MySpacers etc access to you and it turn they would allow you access to them. It’s win win, you don’t have to be a part of any particular clan or use any god-awful gui(s) but the statisticians at Facebook could count you amongst their numbers for their own benefit merely because you “passed through”.
@Gary. Fantastic idea – where do I get one? 😉