Facebook: One more step towards the gutter

By James Rivington

December 13th 2007 | Tell us what you think [ 0 comments ]

Facebook: the best social networking site out there. But for how much longer?

I was the first person amongst my friends to sign up toFacebook. My distaste for MurdochSpace meant I'd been after a decentalternative for a while, and Facebook was certainly that.

Pity then that ever since, it's been sliding down from beinga high-class, functional social networking hub, into a lowbrow, dumbed downpile of web 2.0 scrap.

It's a bit like the Titanic. That ship looked amazingwhen it sailed out of Southampton. Unique,glorious, functional, amazing. But within 48 hours it was covered in silty muckon the bottom of the Atlantic. Decayingforever in a world of ice cold darkness.

I wrote about Facebook a number of months ago, and I saidthat the idea to open the site up to third-party apps was the single moststupid idea in the history of social networking (apart from maybe the idea to launch WAYN).

These days you can't log intoFacebook without being greeted by a trillion irritating 'Pirate' or 'Zombie'requests. Why people feel the need to spread these cancerous, repugnant, viralapplications is beyond me. It makes Faceook almost as ugly and bloated asMurdochSpace itself.

Read: This is why Facebook is going down the toilet

And now, today, the site has sunk one rung lower on thedumbing down ladder of shame.

I logged in to Facebook this morning to discover that thecompulsory 'is' word has now been removed from Facebook's status updates. So nowinstead of writing: "James is not liking the state of Facebook these days," youcan simply say, "James hates Facebook".

Much easier, but also, in my humble opinion, a very badidea.

The change has been coming for a while, but I didn't know ithad finally happened until I logged in this morning to discover about 22 of myfriends' status updates, all saying things like: "... is loving the fact that the'is' has gone" etc.

The irony is, of course, that people are now struggling to thinkof decent updates without using the word 'is' at the beginning.

Now, I'm sorry, but I don't share the view that this change is agood idea. The 'is' was there for a very good reason: to make status updatesrelevant. And to try and discourage the vanity that drives most of the updatesin the first place.

The 'is' made people think about what they were writing, tomake what they wrote interesting, current and relevant. And so most updateswere just that: proper updates.

But already people are banging on about all sorts of things.It seems the status update is no longer a good way to track all those friendsyou have but never chat to. Most updates, even today, are not updates at all.It's vanity. It's human beings' desire to hear the sound of their own voices.And we're all guilty of that at some stage. That includes me.

The 'is' went someway to combat that. But now it's gone.And Facebook once again slides in my estimation. Another reason not to log in tomorrow morning.

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