The fact that Facebook now has over 500 million active users as of summer 2010 has caused me to question how and why I use Facebook.  Additionally, I am now more seriously than ever questioning the idea of a social network with little to zero refinement or sense of community.  I have been using Facebook since my senior year of high school in 2005 as this is the year that Facebook began allowing high school students to use the site.  Prior to this, it was exclusive to college students who were required to verify they were an active student with their EDU domain email address.  Even though I was happy to be able to use the site and get away from MySpace as quickly as possible, this is likely the point where Facebook started going downhill in terms of the user experience.  Over the past few years, web users have seen Facebook deteriorate and, for lack of a better term, sell out in the same way that MySpace had (and continues to do).

Theoretically, it is nice to have a place where old friends and new acquaintances can find you and catch up but I never thought it would get to the point that Facebook would suggest that I add family members as friends when I have no other family members as friends on the site.  Frankly, I find it a bit off-putting that the site can determine that I likely knew or know people when I do not have anyone in their network as a friend.  From the beginning, I felt it was best to limit connections friends to people that I actually wanted to have my personal information and to see information that is currently relevant to my life even though I naively assumed this was still the purpose of Facebook.  I started to see this purpose deteriorate in late 2007; approximately one year after Facebook opened the floodgates and allowed anyone over 13 with a valid email address to join the site.  The race to have the most “friends” and the most “likes” began as users quickly started seeing requests from people they did not know and suggestions to “like” large corporations.  Facebook conveniently uses member’s data such as personal interest and activities to allow companies to decide if you are their target demographic so they can increase sales and profitability.  A site such as Facebook should not be sharing with anyone seeking to exploit this information for his or her own benefit.  Finding another way to turn a profit for the company without selling user information to the highest bidder may well have meant that Facebook would have never reached 500 million users on the other hand, a company that cannot be trusted with privacy should never reach nearly this many users anyway.

“Places” is a new feature that has just recently been implanted to Facebook is astonishingly similar to other popular geotagging services already in existence such as Foursquare and Gowalla.  A feature of “Places” that I personally find distressing is the ability for any of your friends to tag you at any location with them – these may very well may never visit as there is no form of approval needed on your end.  This feature is enabled for everyone by default and has to be turned off in multiple sections of the privacy page after you click a popup to let you know that Facebook would never use information without your permission.

Luckily, I never jumped on the social networking games bandwagon for the reason that I have about as much desire to play a game pretending I am managing a farm as I do to actually change everything in my life and become a farmer in Minnesota.  Sure, “Mafia Wars” seemed like an interesting idea in the beginning to some but after having to see that eight people each had twenty-nine post about characters they had “whacked” on the game, I decided it was entirely too much.  Thankfully, Facebook has since given users the ability to hide these games altogether from the newsfeed as well as to hide individuals play multiple games which leads to a congested newsfeed about how they had nothing better to do for the past three hours than to sit at work and play different games online.

Presently, I find myself using Facebook to waste endless hours (if you add them up) online reading status updates typically from people that I have not seen in 3 years.  Furthermore, as mind numbing as that sounds (and is) I find myself posting similar meaningless status updates about minuscule happenings in my day-to-day life that no one really needs or cares to know.  In the past, I entertained the idea of using the site as a social news aggregator yet I much prefer using sites such as Digg and Twitter for this purpose.

Even though I have all of my privacy settings locked down and have for a couple of years now, I still find myself disliking the way I see the site progressing and sometimes impatiently waiting to see the next big thing in social networking and social media.  I would honestly favor more exclusivity in the next big site – I am not saying the site should be a gateway to elitism, I am just saying that maybe it would be okay if it did not invite and welcome every 14 year old Justin Bieber fan and everyone’s grandmother and creepy uncle.