Kai's Weblog

Facebook is great and all… It allows me keep in touch with people on a daily basis. But what’s the cost of this all-in-one internet portal? Creativity. I’m not talking about not sending a birthday or holiday card to your friend because a “wall post” will do, I’m talking about how Facebook is killing off personal websites.

First there were the photo albums, then notes, then shares. Now virtually all your internet activities can be done via Facebook. And it has taken its toll.

On a personal level, there are sites of mine such as AIS2002.COM, which has 1715 replies to 139 Topics. All but maybe 100 of those posts were posted before 2006, when Facebook began to seriously take over people’s internet activities.

Facebook’s group technology has serious flaws however. Most groups are only highly visited when new, causing thousands to be created daily, often on the exact same premise as countless others. Individual discussion topics can’t be “shared,” only entire groups can. And customization of the groups is largely restricted to “sponsored groups.”

Facebook has an import option for notes that allows you to continue writing things on your blog and have them appear as imported notes on Facebook. That’s kind of the best of both worlds.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this, other than that I’m going to bring the personal website back! And I’m ironically doing that by starting a Facebook group…