Tim Bray on making Facebook work:
My hypothesis is that Facebook works great when you’re only friends with people who, when they post pictures of their kids, you actually want to look at them. Or, as someone said over dinner tonight, with people who you’d walk across a bar to talk to if you saw them.
January 23, 2011 at 11:18 am
You mean, use it like a normal person?
The most annoying people on Facebook (and the most likely to be blocked/restricted even if I can’t unfriend them) are the ones who think it’s a platform for publishing or a way to promote their stuff. (I’m not saying Bray did that.) That’s what fan pages are for. Facebook is for the stuff my actual friends might be interested in.
Everyone loves to hate Facebook, but I think it is spectacularly great software that genuinely makes my life better. So, er, I don’t.
January 23, 2011 at 12:39 pm
I think he’s more dealing with the issue of accepting friend invitations from everyone who friends you, as he probably did and I have done. When 80% of the stuff in your news feed is from people who you don’t care about, it makes it hard to find the energy to log into Facebook. Rather than unfriending people, I have taken to removing them from my News Feed, but I still haven’t quite gotten into Facebook, probably because I spend too much time on Twitter.