Why Facebook sucks
Another topic Scoble and I talked about today was Facebook. I said I don't like Facebook, never have, and I finally figured out why. — It's another one of those user generated content things, only this time I'm building up an address book that I can look at …
Context & Ripple Effects
Dave Winer's critique lands three months after Robert Scoble's Why Facebook, why now? made the case for the platform's momentum, and it reframes that enthusiasm as a trap: the social graph users spend years assembling is stored on Facebook's servers, not theirs. Winer's specific complaint — that he is 'building up an address book' he can only look at through Facebook's interface — turns the platform's core asset into its core liability.
First-order effects
- Power users feel the ceiling first: Scoble has already hit Facebook's confirmed 5,000-friend cap on personal accounts, making the locked-in graph a practical constraint rather than an abstraction.
- Facebook's push into professional networking runs against its own profile design — dating status and photos rather than credentials — leaving LinkedIn's territory contested but not captured.
Second-order effects
- If the address book is the real product, rivals and upstarts compete on portability and export rather than features, pressuring Facebook to either open the graph or defend the walled garden.
- The developer ecosystem inherits the backlash: with columnists already calling Facebook apps 'designed for toddlers,' low-quality engagement threatens the attention that justifies the rumored $100B valuation chatter among fans and investors.
Third-order effects
- The argument prefigures the structural question that dominates social platforms: who owns user-contributed data — the person who generated it or the service that stores it — and whether consent architecture becomes a regulatory and competitive battleground.
- Valuation hype detached from engagement fundamentals invites a correction dynamic where skeptics like Winer shape the narrative as much as the platform's advocates do.
The trend: Social networking is shifting from a content-publishing model to a social-graph-ownership model, forcing a reckoning over whether the relationships users create belong to them or to the platform.