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Facebook is ridiculous… — there — I said it!

Last night I was chatting with a facebook friend — who is very knowledgeable in her field and by no means a dummy in any regard — about an update she made regarding her “hometown” (the German city named “Essen”). I joked that the city has a domain name that could easily be worth a billion dollars. My friend had found it odd that it showed that she was “at” Essen rather than “from” Essen. I followed the link and found out that she had actually listed a company called “Essen” rather than the city named “Essen” as her hometown. This is, however, not user error — the facebook interface is extremely limited and not user-friendly. I have at times found it impossible to link to the information I intended to link to.

In my opinion, the writing is on the wall for facebook.com. This is no longer a viable platform for users to use in a utilitarian way. It has now become a utility that enables companies to use users. Anyone who thinks this website is worth US$ 100 billion is a moron.

I have heard that the going rate to get an Indian child to click “Like” is about 5 cents — so 10,000 “Likes” cost about $500. What is odd is that this (reliable, but perhaps somewhat confused) informant also was “amazed” at how good facebook was at preventing spam. This is the sort of disconnect that has a lot of people not questioning the facebook valuation.

Google, Twitter, Facebook,… — these are all gigantic melting pots in which morsels of information get flooded in a deluge of misinformation. That is the business model: To drown out any meaningful information, such that companies must pay money in the hope of maybe getting some kind of message across.

I no longer see any value in this, and I honestly cannot fathom why any company would have an interest in being associated with such ridiculous nonsense. In my opinion this is the online equivalent of a tabloid newspaper — only worse, because tabloid newspapers at least have enough sense to actually pay for the kind sensationalism that will attract gawkers consistently.

I am not going to close my facebook account yet (though I wonder if perhaps the facebook management team might?)… but I am now officially looking for a comparable platform that is not run by people who are cutesy clowns, but rather by people who are actually reasonable — and who also expect their users to have brains rather just eyeballs. Oh, how I miss omidyar.net!