Why I Hate Facebook
or What Social Media Shall We Use Today?


A presentation by Peter Fleck for the
2008 Nonprofit Technology and Communication Conference

March 27, 2008
pfhyper [at] gmail.com

Find this document on the web at http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=agmj7qdbtqjv_271c6wzx7c6

Slides are now available: Why I hate Facebook

Various quotes and notes...

Chris Brogan
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/twitter-revisited/
Twitter is the stupidest thing anyone could ever imagine inventing. If I said to you, “I’ve got an application that I want you to install that is addictive, time consuming, cross-platform accessible, and otherwise as sprawling as kudzu,” would you say yes? No. Of course not.

Don't be a business, be a human. Also don't be a brand. The social web is about being human. About being vulnerable.

Henry Story
http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/social_networking_3_0
What separates these Web 2.0 players from Web 3.0 are the data silos that stop their customers from being able to link up to each other.

Dan York
http://www.disruptivetelephony.com/2008/03/how-do-you-see.html

Beth Kanter
Slide show on social networking

http://www.slideshare.net/kanter/funders-network-presentation?src=embed
Beth's blog
http://beth.typepad.com/

Danah Boyd
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html
Danah's blog
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/

Doc Searls
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2008/01/15/when-social-media-are-neither/
Twitter is a social medium. Facebook is a social habitat. Twitter is a new breed of Web site/service that grew out of blogging. Facebook is a walled garden: a place you have to go to be social in the ways it facilitates and permits.

Josh Catone at ReadWriteWeb
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_could_use_a_little_friendfeed.php
Facebook does many of things we do on other sites. It has notes, which are kind of like blogging, but they're nowhere near as robust as Wordpress or MovableType. It has status updates, which are kind of like Twitter, but they're one-way and don't have an archive. It has photos and videos, but nothing nearly as well-made as Flick or YouTube, or Picasa or Vimeo. It has events, which are probably as easy to use as Upcoming, but not nearly as complete when it comes to an inventory of actual things to do. In short, Facebook does a lot of things, but besides being an address book, it doesn't do anything else really, really well.

Following are the links for sites that I refer to in the presentation plus some bonus links.

OpenSocial info
http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/faq.html

Ning
http://www.ning.com/

FriendFeed
http://friendfeed.com/

Tweetstats
http://tweetstats.com/

Twittermeter
http://www.twittermeter.com/#

Auto post to Twitter from an RSS blog feed
http://twitterfeed.com/

Social Networking in plain English by Lee Lefever
http://www.commoncraft.com/video-social-networking

Seesmic
http://www.seesmic.com
Loic Le Meur's blog
http://loiclemeur.com/

DataPortability Group
http://dataportability.org/
DataPortability video
http://www.vimeo.com/610179

Delicious bookmarks used in preparing for this presentation
http://del.icio.us/pfhyper/mntc

New Links! (Not on the handout)

Aaron Landry
Twitter's Deception
http://s4xton.com/1683/twitters-deception/
Aaron also has a post about the conference
http://s4xton.com/1684/minnesota-council-of-nonprofits-technology-and-communications-conference/

DataPortability Group
http://dataportability.org/
DataPortability video
http://www.vimeo.com/610179