Facebook tired with itself as a serious communications venture, dropped @facebook.com e-mail addresses this week.
I think it is just a sign of fatigue with facebook. It is great, it works, it does what it says on the box, it is full of crap.
We all have folk on ignore. We are all annoyed by people's childrens parties and small accidental comedy episodes which get likes in the 50s or more. We most of all hate glib quotation shares.
The trouble is that we have some difficulty in screening out those trite jpeg messages which talk about what love actually is, or what real men are, or what a sister is, or what the day is in very over simple philosophical terms. Especially when people start sharing them to their other halves' FB homepages then we begin to put them on ignore. Because they are jpegs the text content cannot be blocked out by any algorythm (yet ?)
So we ignore the trite idiots who expose us to this crap. My sister in law is the worst offender, maybe 12 in an average day at one point. When it came to one of her kids birthdays, only six liked out of 300 "friends" . Everyone had her on ignore.
I know too, if I had a bit of a blurbing day then maybe a couple more people fell off my timeline and followed me no more. I think that is a shame. I should have had more shares to relevant groups or screened out or listed in peeps but it wither is fiddly or not possible on FB
FB addressed this with the "importance" algorithm which takes likes and probably rate-of-liking, tags, places, number of comments and some content words from the OP to push the post out to your friends list as being of critical value. Also It seems some very seldom posters get air time. THis helps cut down the spam but kind of messes up my general need for a stream of some attention rather than blushing 10 likes and 10 comments.
It annoys us does it not that some people get instantly dozens of likes and happy comments. Sod that though. They were popular in the first place off-line mostly. It is their real friends lack of picking up the phone or dropping in for a coffee which gives credence, a critical mass to which a little flock of followers like to. Facebook colludes as mentioned. These become big important threads, little jimmy spilling chocolate ice cream in the hotel pool.... a hard day work, wishing it was friday....a wonderful life lifting cabin tour to a luxury mountain resort...
I have so many people on ignore now that I get mostly STV news from the old homeland. If someone likes a post of mine, I usually have to go onto their time line and find something to compliment them on.
The time is ripe for one of the other emerging platforms to offer something new and more controllable. Perhaps Twitter may buy out a smaller player which offers one of the new image-share-reply type set ups. Google plus is spreading but who wants google knowing all about you are serving you spam across its omnipresence?
FB dare not change its little blue magic 2002 look and 2008 live scripting. It cant afford the band width either. However it may as before experiment with something rather more radical than the "time line" replacement to the "wall" of old.
Until that point I judge by this 2014 1st quarter's "likes " on my posts and those of the folk I dont have on ignore or venture on their walls, sorry time line, that in fact facebook fatigue is hitting.
I believe the current 2002 look FB with the current barriers to having sensible, relevant, fun content being served up means that it has reached the end of its product life cycle in western countries and either needs a clever revamp or it will loose out to a superior competitor just as freinds-reunited was killed by FB.
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