RSS
Home
Fatty Facebook Goes on a Diet
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
I’ve been on both Facebook and MySpace since day one (I’m one of those annoying “early adapters”). At first I favored MySpace, but mostly because all of my friends were on it. This was also in the days (the days = circa 2005) that I was ripping up the college radio airwaves with my self-bestowed musical elitism and the only two sites to scope out unsigned bands were MySpace and Pure Volume.
The MySpace of old was comforting. The cheerful orange box with your “about me” and the smooth blue (Facebook-esque) column for listing your favorite books and music was simple, easy to use, and easy on the eyes. But then the mythical figure known as “Tom” ingested a large amount of creative crack and allowed the MySpace programmers to let users design their own page layouts. 16 year old girls rejoiced and glittered the living daylights out of both their pages and their friend’s pages. Keeping in touch with friends, family, and my fellow musicians via MySpace became irritating and headache inducing.
So I made the switch to Facebook. The honeymoon period was awesome.
And then, in order to compete with MySpace, Facebook started letting users write and introduce apps.
(Sigh)
I went through many of the five stages of grief before I figured out how to hide both apps AND people (the more egregious abusers of said apps- you didn’t have that option at first). But there was still the onslaught of friends sending me drinks and smiley faces and hearts. Don’t even get me started on the absurdity that is Farmville (in my opinion- the worst of the offenders). However, just having won a long and tiring campaign to get my mother to join Facebook, I couldn’t give up on it just yet.
I get why Facebook feels the need to compete. Their initial growth was hindered greatly by the site being restricted to college users. Opening the site to high school students and the general public (yes, there’s a difference) helped, but allowing Facebooks user based programming (apps) go the way of MySpace (glitter) may drive away the individuals who flocked to Facebook in search of social networking serenity.
Or maybe not. Maybe the 1,000+ user groups with names like “Facebook Needs to go Back to the Original Format!” have paid off, and maybe…just maybe, Facebook is listening to its users by launching Facebook Lite.
Facebook Lite really is like the Facebook of old. Networking, status updates, news feeds WITHOUT the apps- it’s all there, minus the invites beaconing me to find out what 80’s television character I am. It also seems to be lite on the ads as well, but I suspect that will change before too long. The format of Facebook Lite feels a lot like Twitter, and the rumblings in the social networking underground is that the simplistic Facebook Lite is a direct swipe at the microblogging site. As far as I’m concerned, if they want to battle it out for simplicity, I’m all for it.
If you, like me, think that maintaining a fake farm by way of a COMPUTER is absurd, try it out. The site is http://lite.facebook.com/
Related Articles:
Add a Comment
