The Anti-Social Media

I’ve been spending this week playing catch up with Social Media news, but most people are still talking about Facebook privacy.  I’m sick of Facebook.  There’s only so much I can cover in terms of Facebook before I start going in circles.

I want to know what’s driving you all nuts right now on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, wherever.  What are you all seeing that makes the internet a worse place to be? What’s going to hell?  Let me know.

Some days I think to myself, “The kids don’t get it.”

Yesterday I tried to read a blog post from a mobile marketing agency on my iPhone. I read a lot of agency blogs.  It’s a good way to get inside the minds of people who are shaping the future of online marketing, and provides me a lot of rant material. However, I was in a hurry and trying to read the post on my iPhone, but I had two wait a whole three minutes for the full website to load.  You’d think, given the agency was talking about mobile advertising, they would have a mobile optimized version of their site.

No.  You’d be wrong, you’d be very wrong.

I come across these sites three or four times A DAY.  Agencies write about Foursquare and Gowalla, location based advertising, iPhone apps, yet they don’t have a blog optimized for mobile viewing.  I’ve even come across a site that was entirely in flash.  That one looked GREAT on my iPhone.  It’s two-faced.  It’s weak.  You can do better.

Marketers, if you’re going to be bringing advertisements to my phone, prove to me you can do it right. Walk the walk. Make sure your site is optimized for mobile viewing.  If I can do it, you can too! No excuses.

When I was younger, I struggled with depression.  I was halfway through my first year in college, and felt like I had no friends.  I was still adjusting to a new environment and life, and I spent most of my days either in class, practicing music or studying.  It sucks to feel that alone you want to disappear.

Thankfully, I had a laptop and a high speed internet connection.  I was able to create a user name, anonymous email, and start a blog that got me through it.  No, you can’t see it, it was private then and I deleted it a long time ago.  However, through my new identity, I was able to connect with people dealing with the same things and people who got through them.  That blog was the first step of many to getting myself out of the dark place I was in.

It took a lot of consideration for me to write this post.  I don’t want to talk about such personal topics so openly online using my real identity.  People assume you’ve gone through depression and you’re suicidal for life.  No one wants anything negative, whether in your social life or health, associated with your identity.

That’s what scares me so much about people tying their online life into their real identity so much.  Sure, you can set up anonymous accounts, but it seems like people take you less seriously these days unless they know the name and face behind the screenname.  Without that layer of anonymity, we lose the ability to talk about the deeply painful without alienating the hundreds of connections we have online or having them mutate it into something more horrible.

When we lose our privacy online, we lose a lot of the openness that comes with it. That worries me.  One of the great aspects of the internet is people connecting to other people with similar problems and working through them together.  This type of outreach and community can be very helpful for people who share medical problems or other difficult personal issues that they don’t want to expose openly.

It’s getting harder and harder to obtain those levels of privacy.  Facebook and Google follow you wherever you go.  People want a name behind the avatar.  We may be more authentic, but somewhere in there, we lose the ability to deal with difficult problems authentically.

Caroline’s Comment on Facebook: Too Big to Quit:

If you don’t read the comments here, you’re missing out.  There’s only so much I can cover, and other people’s viewpoints inspire me.

Caroline Martin wrote an amazing follow up to my post on Monday that has a huge number of ways to increase your privacy on Facebook, or to sign up to quit Facebook at the end of the month.  Check out that comment, and check out her site.

I’m a big advocate of unfollowing people and unfriending them online.  I can’t keep up with everything.  I’ve made bad decisions of who I let in my online life.  So every now and then, I go and purge some people who I don’t communicate with, or just have no desire to keep up with anymore.

However, these purges lead to the awkward act of being refriended.

There’s nothing more awkward than someone adding you as a friend again, when you know you purposely removed them.  You don’t want to say “You suck at Facebook, stay out of mine.” At the same time however, you don’t want to let them know you have open contempt for them.

I usually hit the ignore button.  If I’ve removed you once, I did it for a decent enough reason.  On the other hand, I’ve known friends who will lie and say they never got the request.  Or, every now and then I’ve seen people sit on requests for ages so they don’t have to deal with them.

The world of online frenemies is complex and tricky.  With so much information online, it’s important to let in people whom we trust and who won’t screw us over.  Still, being friended again is still the most awkward part of my anti-social media job.

Facebook drives people nuts.  People are quitting over the latest privacy changes.  Others are rushing to defend Zuckerburg and Facebook.  And everyone else is caught in the middle of what to do with their account.

I have a lot of friends who run social media campaigns or control their company’s Facebook page who want to quit but cannot because of their job responsibilities.  They run accounts that are liked by thousands of people.  If they quit their account, that page goes with them.  It’s awful for businesses who run pages.  What are they supposed to do when an employee leaves the company?  Worse, what if that employee leaves on bad terms?  They can’t hand it over because that page is tied to that account permanently.

A lot of other people I know won’t quit Facebook because they keep up with most of their contacts on there now.  It’s easier to keep up with than email or IM.  They don’t want to leave because their friends are there and seemingly staying there.

This is why I think Facebook is evil.  Facebook tied their service into businesses and people’s personal lives so well people cannot quit it.  Businesses would lose access to customers.  People lose contact info for hundreds of friends.  It’s come to the point where Facebook is too big and too centralized for people to quit.

Do you think Facebook is too big to quit?  I want to know what you all think.

This is not Social Media News, Mashable.

Worse, this is promoting infringement of copyrighted materials.  Do you not realize all of these games are under a copyright?  Sure, these games are a lot of fun, and I love them, but you all should realize these are illegal, especially considering how much news you cover about games.

It’s stories like this one that make me sick.

Facebook History Lesson

Update: 12:30pm EST 5/15/2010 YouTube and Google are onto me and are giving me video difficulties.  I’m working on reposting it.  Sorry for the delay!

Update 2:  It’s working now!  Sorry for the technical difficulties earlier.  You can try and stop the Anti-Social Media revolution, but you can’t keep us down!

Facebook is so depressing these days, it’s nice to remember where it came from.  It’s also nice to make up a history and past that never existed for it.

If you still haven’t subscribed to the Anti Social Media YouTube channel, you have until the end of today, May 14, 2010, to subscribe and enter for a chance to win an awesome prize!