It’s Good to Be Green…With Envy

I’d take Sergey over Marc any day of the week. That’s why when I first heard about Facebook’s new chatting utility from Gina Trapani over at Lifehacker, I didn’t really care. Google rolled out a similar item years ago and as far as I was concerned, Gmail chat was my staple. I was reluctant to get too excited over what seemed like yet another device that exposed my whereabouts onto a largely disinterested or conversely, overly gawker-ish audience. Truth be told I use Facebook relatively scarcely, mostly taking advantage of the feeds feature to see if friends have updated their profiles with new pictures.

On the flipside I use my Gmail chat quite often, preferring this over most of the other instant messaging and chat features offered by services such as AOL or MSN. The good news about Facebook’s new chat is that, like Gmail chat, it’s not a downloadable external client, and it pre-populates your buddies based on your contacts list. Facebook has capitalized on the trend of the passive user (and those of us who sometimes forget that we even have Facebook open on a tab in our internet browser) to incorporate an application that ensures we click on our accounts a little more often during our days and/or depending on how often we get pinged by a contact. It’s a savvy move for the company and an obvious next step in terms of features on the site, but the utility lacks a certain efficiency in multi-tasking various simultaneous chats. Clutter erupts at the bottom of the screen which makes attempting to integrate it as an activity during the work day all the more difficult. And I can’t speak for everyone else, but if I can’t use it as a diversion during my day, I’m certainly less inclined to use it as a past time on my time off.

Facebook Is Like A Fake, Stuffed Dog

Something struck me recently when reading Dave Churbuck’s blog. For those of you unfamiliar with Churbuck, he is VP Marketing at Lenovo and a pretty fab blogger in his own right. He has a way of cutting through much of the subtle, latent Web 2.0 BS and calling things out.

I happened upon Churbuck’s post around the time I was “connecting” on LinkedIn with past coworkers and trying to loogle them. It started out quite innocently with me trying to find one of my good friends on there who is a student at UCLA’s management school. I realized just how annoying it is to be prompted for the umpteenth time to upgrade my account with that tiny yellow bar of a button that kept flashing every time I tried and failed to click away from the page.

Why must I be menaced so? What had I done but been a happy user who made frequent visits to the site and spread good word about its attributes? When did LinkedIn start bugging me to upgrade my membership? Thinking back, I had started noticing this a while back, but it took a few months to settle in my mind to the point of distracting me from enjoying the site.

Unfortunately around the time this malaise set in, I was also on Facebook. My friend had sent me another of those SuperWall pictures which required me clicking on the image, but before I could get to that image I was navigated to yet another page which prompted me to send the very image to all of my friends before I was allowed to open the actual image. Thankfully it also selected all of my friends as recipients of this picture so it saved me the work of having to send a picture of a dog to 50 of my nearest and dearest.

On the flipside, when I tried to “pull one over” on the system by “unselecting” all, it prompted me to choose one lucky recipient of an Alaskan Husky picture which most likely barked, licked its nutz, and said “Happy Holidaze” when clicked on. Annoyed that I had just spent seven minutes of my life driving towards a reality far less appealing than the my mind’s conjurings, I started to philosophize a bit on Churbuck’s likening of “spam” to this tactic that Facebook API developers have taken to spreading the word of their creations. Initially I had taken to this feature, especially because I could choose which of my friends would care to partake in a game of Scrabble with me and go a few rounds. Same with Flixter. In a sense it also allowed me to be more social with people I wouldn’t have contact with on a daily basis and rediscover or discover connections I never would have found otherwise.

Newsweek maintains that Facebook is the console of the future (replacing Wii??) and it will connect people socially through computers as never before. Considering it’s the sixth most trafficked site in the world, it’s a possibility. But really short of wireless remotes combined with action-oriented kicking ass, competitive games w/amazing graphics, how can the existing Facebook APIs compete with what Sony, IBM, and Microsoft are putting out?