On Friday, I decided to stop having Facebook scrape and post my blog feed. I just don’t feel like blog posts fit the very ephemeral vibe of FB, and, frankly, it irritates the living crap out of me when people post comments about the blog posts on FB instead of posting them here. I am also annoyed by people who feel the need to crosspost each and every thing they say on their blog on Facebook AND Twitter AND LinkedIn AND whatever other fad-of-the-week social site they just signed up for. Sorry, pals, you’re just not THAT fascinating. And I don’t want to be accused of the same shameless self-promotion.
Also, I don’t really like the idea that everything in the online world has to be seen through the filter of Facebook. It really defeats the sense of exploration that makes going online an interesting endeavor for me and reduces everything to just another commodity to be peddled. Monolithic entities like Facebook and Google and Microsoft are antithetical to the chaotic spirit of the Internet and lessen its real impact by overconcentrating.
I still think it’s a damn shame that Facebook killed personal blogging, but blogging was actually a very imperfect tool for people who were looking for a way to engage in personal interaction. Facebook is similarly very imperfect, but comes a lot closer, as long as you are satisfied with very superficial interaction. From the looks of things, it’s pretty clear that a vast majority of people are really only capable of that vapid communication in the first place. What gets lost on Facebook is the exchange that would happen when someone wrote a thoughtful or moving or infuriating blog post that could trigger comments and counterposts and e-mail and friendships and feuds. Absolutely none of that happens by clicking the “I Like This!” button. Last year around this time, I wrote that I thought there could be a renaissance of personal blogging once all the poseurs and wanna-bes had been sucked into the Facebook vortex, but I haven’t seen it happen. More’s the pity, because I think the people who really fit the blogger mold are still out there and might still have something to say.
I have to agree, though I wouldn’t have said it half as well. In putting my blog feed on Facebook I had hoped it would drive some traffic to it. I can’t tell for sure whether it has, but it was somewhat frustrating to have some comments on FB and others on the blog site itself (not like I get that many, anyway).
I figure that most of the people on my Facebook friend list already read my blog, so it’s not terribly useful for driving new traffic here in the first place. And the ones who don’t visit here probably don’t give a rat’s ass about seeing the posts on FB, either.
I know some people who treat Facebook like free advertising for their website, but I’m not trying to sell anything, so that whole approach seems unnecessary to me.
I guess in the end, I wanted mainly to put FB back into perspective as a way to occasionally touch base with people rather than as a proxy for the whole damn Internet.