Mark Zuckerberg Or: How I Learned to Stop Caring and Not Love the Facebook.

What I am going to attempt to brief describe are present problems with Facebook, and how this social networking site is flawed to the extent of becoming unusable for small-town college students.
Disclaimer, any evidence given is based on my own experiences, your life may vary, satisfaction not guaranteed.

Let's take what we know, facebook is a social networking site that was originally a college exclusive and then opened to the wider population. It is in a direct compitetion with friendster, Hi5, myspace, and other "general use" social networks.

All of these general use social networks use the basic idea of a profile page. A user is free to modify large amounts of this profile page but in the end the same goal is for them to convey fairly basic ideas about a person. They also all offer varying degrees of "privacy". More on these ideas later.

So here is the main point, from it's original use for small-town college students, facebook has lost usability. River Falls is a small town, it is far enough away from the Twin Cities that you can not simply take metro transit in for social happenings. With respect to this the opening of facebook to the larger populous, the addition of global groups, and the back-lash to the news feed have all had horrible effects on building a facebook campus community.

Opening facebook has had the affect of raising security concerns while at the same time alienating the previous core-user base, the college student.

Global groups have resulted in lowered membership in local groups, this directly effects small campuses where members of a local group would recognize other people from the same group, now with it being common for groups to be over several hundred members such an event is rare if not outright impossible.

There was tremendous backlash to the addition of the facebook newsfeed. Because of the factor of the newsfeed itself not providing aggregation for all of one's friends' changes and the backlash which resulted in many users disabling the newsreeder from ever displaying an update in addition to limiting profile access even more the present state of facebook is created.

Presently facebook is a collection of profiles linked through real life acquaintances and online groups. Profiles are generally banned to anyone that is not a friend of the profile and thus losses it's usefulness. Your friends already know the info in your profile, it's pointless. The security options have resulted in greatly reduced usability for the whole of facebook. The online groups are limited discussion areas where people across the globe can interact. Unfortunately, you will not go out and party tonight with someone in Detroit unless you are already in Detroit.

Because of these global tie-ins, facebook has become a social network that promotes a pseudo-social user base. The users are encouraged to trade ideas across the globe while overlooking their current location and the community suffers.

I don't think there is anyway to reclaim facebook for the campus community. I don't think facebook is in anyway more special or unquie than myspace or vox, or friendster, or hi5. I don't think I have much use for facebook anymore. I had some great times with it two years ago when it was a campus only thing, but it feels my time with Facebook is past and nothing will bring it back.