Social Media, take two - Facebook has issues

IDG News Service - Facebook confirmed Monday what some users have been noticing for the past few days: Its site is having problems. (Computerworld)

I thought this made an ironic follow up to my post on September 9, 2009. You will note that this article is dated the 21st of September and that Facebook indicates they have only began experiencing the issues that caused me to throw in the towel "this morning" (the 21st.).

Clearly, this makes me wonder if the owners of Facebook are doing any site monitoring at all. The problems I have experience are identical to those that they claim are being experienced, yet have impacted me, in an escalating fashion for more than three months.

Facebook may have some "fun and important challenges" and I wish them all the best. If they want to start with basic performance before added more gee whiz factors, I would suggest that would be their best course of action.

Social Media, take one.

For me, the great social media experiment is pretty much done. Be it MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, I have decided that there is little point to them, and even less point in continuing to use them.

My latest disillusionment is with Facebook. Ever since the denial of service attack, the holes in the service have become more glaring, knocking the already fading bloom off of the rose, and leaving the rather painful thorns, in the form of clunky interfaces. What is tragic is that these interfaces exist in much more mature forms elsewhere.

Maybe it is because I spend all day fighting with poorly coded apps that I have lost patience with ajax and database errors wiping out my content.

Maybe it is because I already have a number of perfectly good email and IM interfaces and Facebook is yet one more place I have to check in an already busy day because their email and IM interfaces are closed - and pretty rickety.

Maybe it is because of the poor third party apps that tend to go stale long before I have finished using the send more, get more hook because I have spent more time resetting the security. And that is on those apps I don't abandon outright because they look like they were coded with a random text generator.

Maybe it is because, like every tool before it back to the beginning, I am getting more junk - call it spam, call it marketing - than I am getting useful updates from friends, and even some of my friends have begun direct marketing things at me...or should I say ex-friends.

Maybe it is the generally siloed nature of the data sink that seems to consume increasingly more time to sort through that vexes me.

In reality, it is, at any one time, a combination of all of these things. I have watched the general decline in posts from my circle of friends, even those I consider good friends and watched their updates move back towards more traditional methods, like email, IM, on-line photo sites and just not posting. This is not a knock against my friends, rather, I think it highlights that I am not the only one who has come to this conclusion.

So I am going to return to the old ways. I will leave my profile up, but if you really want me to know what is going on, drop me a note. My email address is there and I am on all the major IM channels.

In the meantime, I have mission-critical apps to deal with.