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I think we know this is very early, and it's not clear what will happen. But we are wary.
Another option would be to establish one (or more) fan pages for the more personal stuff, such as a "Milan pictures" fan page, possibly with approval of people who join the page.
That having been said, it would be nice if Facebook fan pages allowed more than one feed to be incorporated into the page, but I assume that Facebook's newest employees will be making the same suggestion.
What really surprises me having been in tech since 1975 is that there is no one out there challenging facebook for its crown. It's almost as if people said "oh there's facebook, we give up" and they shelved their development efforts.
There's a way to beat this giant and I know how, but it will take some creative development skills, a loosening of the legal strings a bit and some guts to step out and develop the alternative to facebook.
Back when there were search engines like Yahoo and Altavista and Vivisimo nobody thought anything else would come along. And then...there was this almost white page with a word in the midst of it along with a little area for text called....'GOOGLE'. Now Google is top of the heap and everything else is playing catch up ball.
Same goes for facebook. Only they don't know it yet.
M
You are so out of touch with the real audience of Facebook.
Stop, read that again.
Facebook and Zuckerberg understand that the small IT audience is not where they will make money. On Facebook I have over 100 friends who mostly found me. These friends are from my past I am amazed that they find me - but they do. And of these 100+ friends, who I approve and want to hear from, at least 30-50% of them post at least weekly of what they are up to. Even the Mafia war sucked me in because my good friend likes it.
So after reading my response and re-reading your post, you are right. Facebook isn't for a professional conversations. It is a place to hang out and have a beer, to relax after a day and to catch up with people you know and only those people. It's the first real Bar on the Internet.
I think eventually it could be expanded to include those features you like about FriendFeed and Twitter.
You qualified the other day that the Facebook purchased of FF is for easy R&D. I don't think this analysis is correct. I think Zuck took a play from M$FT's play book to take out a competitor and to get some good development resources. And on top of everything it really didn't cost Facebook a lot of real cash.
Just admit that you are a FF fan-boy and you hate that it is being sucked up by the fat-cat and will be watered down from what you like - maybe.
Oh, not everyone in the world wants an open conversation with everyone else in the world. For those who do, go for it, for those who don't that's ok -- just having a choice of either communication model is fine with me.
Two cures:
1. We need to find a new friendfeed, unless
2. Facebook opens up.
You know, many of us just don't want have business or industry discussions on Facebook, certainly my nieces and old school friends will not be interested in my babblings and conversations there and I'm not keen on mixing the groups.
It's not my day for comments - the Twitter signin is over capacity, I don't want to sign in with Facebook Connect and end up with a comment to my feed there and clicking on the link to the Facebook Note in the FF widget to the right took me to my Facebook homepage even when signed in, sigh.
I guess we will all go back to fractured conversations on blogs at this rate.
I removed my ff embed from my blog today, mostly due to getting used to the possibility that it won't be a growing service. That real estate is up for grabs at the moment. It was my virtual home's white board, time to get another one that won't be tied to an outside company working.
In every case, I experience FB as clunky. At first, when only the academic account was active, it wasn't too bad--I threw some cows and whatnot, tired of that quickly, and moved along. But it has grown progressively worse, just chock full of silly bells and whistles, and somehow more devoid of content and navigational ease (or sensibility) with every alleged improvement.
By contrast, FriendFeed is a Zen Garden--clean, elegant, focused on content, and ideal for bringing ideas and information together so that they can be discussed (at length, even, which is fabulous) and archived (discussion and all).
It's one place where friending/following is very easy to manage, and is driven by quality and connection. Haven't experienced anything else quite like it.
It will be interesting to see how things develop, and whether anything else manages to be quite so satisfactory.
I do think facebook should give us even more privacy controls, to allow certain "public" conversations from time to time, and other such fine-grained markings for images and statuses, etc.
But at the same time, I also post stuff that I find interesting to Facebook because the links are more accessible to people that I know better, so there's a place for both as far as I am concerned.
To echo Lewis, Facebook started out as a place for nerds to find dates (something like that). Now, it's a place for grandmas to see photos of the grandkids, Facebook Pages notwithstanding.
Personally, I think someone should develop another version of Friendfeed, because it's going to be some time yet before we see the open, distributed, non-proprietary web.
Yes brands/companies/services need to have a presence in FB and there are numerous ways of developing business (see Paul Dunay). However, in many cases, for insight & engagement there are are numerous other social media (blogs, forums, communities, portals, message boards, review sites) especially focused on cell phones, hotels, cars, desinations. FB groups on such discussions are buried deep via a clunky search and are often limited to a few inactive members with a level discussion: "Here's my new car - Yo, cool dude like, it." (Twitter conversations are likely to be similarly limited, althoug the potential for engagement & customer service is very high.) Are there potential, present, former and competitor cutomers posting questions, answers, recommendations and suggestions on Facebook and the like? Are the pros and cons of products/services/brands fully debated? I think not. Go to targetted social media for the inisight to feed into your marketing, communications, product, customer service and engagement.
The end-goal is to provide a personalized newspaper (newsfeed) - and that includes work, family, friends, local, national, international. No "common" user would rationally want or be able to manage two separate newspapers. Both FB and Twitter are gunning for this market and it would be stupid of either to limit themselves to anything smaller.