the squibix family blog

While we were kind of excited when we first joined facebook, the enthusiasm didn't last. Leah still posts occasionally, especially when she wants to plug a particular blog post to a larger audience, but taking a look at my profile indicates that I haven't had anything "on my mind" since March of this year. Tweeting once a month is about all the social networking I can manage these days, I'm afraid.

But that's fine, because facebook totally sucks. You know, there's this thing called the internet, which provides a wide variety of services: games, instant messaging, blog publishing, even email! All available on open, public platforms that don't harvest your data and sell it to the highest bidder (though I suppose that the success of gmail shows that people don't really worry about that anymore). But no, it's all so much more fun when we do it within the facebook ecosystem. Didn't walled garden portals go out with AOL, like fifteen years ago?!

Here's what I think is happening. Just like the browser took over from the operating system as people's primary way of interacting with their computer (don't think that's true? just try using a computer without an internet connection!), facebook is now taking over from the browser. And since these sorts of cycles are constantly speeding up as we move inexorably towards the singularity, we can expect within months the creation of a facebook ap that offers its own messaging. At this point new computers will be set up to open to facebook on startup, because the rest of the web will be dead (just like Wired said). Hey, as horrible as that seems, it won't be all bad if it stops people typing "google" into the google search box built into their browser when they want to find something on the internet.

I know, I know: most of my complaints about facebook sound like the grumpy old-man ramblings of someone who's owned a domain name for eight or nine years and who totally remembers someone once talking about reading Usenet. But once you read the following, copied directly from an actual update auto-posted by a facebook ap, you won't be able to do anything but agree with me that facebook must be evil:

Johanna just found a lonely Sea Turle in Fish World and put it up for adoption! While maintaining their fish, a Sea Turle made its way in to Johanna's tank! While roaming the open waters this turtle lost it's way and it needs a new home!

Yeah sure, the content isn't facebook's fault, but the very fact that the site provided the platform upon which this atrocity could be committed is enough to forever damn it in my sight. Except, you know, when I want to catch up with old friends I haven't talked to in a while.

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