The digital Brooks

It’s been quite the trip today – packing, setting up, and getting ready to report on all sorts of goings-on in the world of Star Wars. The Old Republic has a panel that my friend Jake is apparently on. I’ll be there, recording, taking photos and video, and then I’ll be moving on to Twittering to my hearts content for LucasArts.

The good news is that I‘ll be able to Twitter as I stand in line for toys. Yup – it’s a helluva job.

This afternoon I came across a great little article, asking if the time of Facebook had passed. Given the fact that parents are now joining it in force and a feed can quickly become packed with garbage like MySpace did towards the end of its own importance, people around the web are asking if Facebook is nearing the end of the cycle.

The short answer is no, and the long  answer is probably. Spluh?

The reason the answers differ is because there is no real answer, and we certainly can’t tell when  social networking site begins to make the voyage to unimportance. As proof of this, I push you out towards an article asking ths same question in early 2008. The main topic is ‘social network fatigue, as it is in conversations today on Twitter (which becomes quickly poetic). Will people get sick of the million posts on Facebook and constantly being connected? How soon until we move on?

My short answer is that we aren’t going to be moving on very quickly. Facebook has taken great pains to keep themselves at the forefront of social network – Facebook Connect is a small example of this fact. As things become necessary and Facebook can adapt, it will survive. This is the area that MySpace failed in; pages on MySpace work one way, and the underlying architecture didn’t get out of date until recently. So good for them.

But Facebook has the ability to keep moving forward until someone figures out a way to revolutionize the whole setup once again. So, the short answer is no, Facebook will be just fine. Afterall, you are probably reading this from Facebook thanks to the fact it automatically pulls feeds from my blog. It’s great.

However, the achilles heel of Facebook is exactly the same as MySpace – you freakin’ people. You ruin everything you touch.

MySpace, once upon a time was a place for performance acts to gain notoriety. It was a place where you could go – ONE place – to find out info on all your favorite stuff. Then your friends joined, and you could keep up with them. What a blast, this new thing called ‘friend feeds’. Slowly, however, the function of MySpace took a backseat to shallow, meaningless visuals and terrible people attempting to quickly cash-in on the new place to make money.

They cash in via E-Fame and E-Money. On the one hand you have what essentially boils down to people being so self-absorbed they believe you joined the network to follow them, not for yourself. This level of egotism pushes over-hyped and constant updates from teenagers and their like who start groups as if it was an E-War of sorts. Social Networks can survive these battles – Twitter shows that all too well. But the money, that’s the scary part.

Following the human side of unwarranted self-importance is always the business side of things, and cashing in on the former makes the latter the most dangerous. On MySpace we saw the forced updates, sponsored frend requests, and careers made from MySpace itself. Facebook has a much more insidious culprit – the quiz.

A Facebook quiz isn’t much different from the thousands of terrible quiz sites that populate the internet, with the sole difference being how it forces updates to all of your friends, clogging their feeds quickly. Some are creative – the Pick 5 campaign snagged me for a little while. But others which require meaningless answers to determine ‘which state you are’ or ‘what letter of the alphabet should your name start with’ are not even slightly fun diversions. But people do them out of boredom and fill up my feed.

So I block your feed. Every time now. Yup -if you have answered two quizzes in a row and published the results I no longer get your updates. I don’t wish to soun arrogant, but I don’t have time to wade throug that garbage hoping for an update rfom you I actually care about. It seems lately that I have blocked more and more friends. Over time, I believe, I will soon have blocked half of my friends on my list. And at that point, I have to wonder – Why the hell do I still come to this site?

I’m not there yet, but we aren’t exactly far off. While I don’t believe I alone determine the life or death of social networks, I’ve found I’m part of the group that determines the rise or fall of these things. We Internet people.

And every single one of us hates your damn quizzes.