Facebook Fail

It is not unusual to complain that facebook profiles are disingenuous, boring, hip, preening, or vain. But what offends me about them is that they are wasteful -- in their current form, facebook profiles are a pure and effortful waste of clean, high-quality data. With scads of talented developers and more money than, if not God, certainly Saint Peter, why can't they take the information that we have so lovingly and trustingly offered up and do something interesting with it?

For example, why not plug people's work & school info into a timeline? The NY Times has amazing timelines with images that blow out when you scroll over them and detailed captions. Wouldn't that make it easier to understand the trajectories our friends have taken? Wouldn't that be more fun to look at?

Or, why not let people drop photos into some sort of e-scrapbook interface? Facebook has borrowed the "album" metaphor without using any of the visual benefits. Why not let people make digital collages, combining images and text?

Why not link up with the Amazon feature that lets you look inside books so that you could page through your friends' favorites? Why not play samples of people's favorite music? Why hide the quotations I have so lovingly chosen at the freaking bottom of all the other info? Why not let people put their favorites into some sort of hierarchy or flow chart or web, showing how their love of folk emerged from their love of classical guitar? Why an ugly, useless, flat, unimaginative list?

By presenting information this way, facebook deflates it. Facebook deflates us. We flatten and sadden into flat, paratactic screen-people, just collections of unaffiliated and disorganized likes and dislikes, wants and diswants, a shuffle of sheet-thin days. Facebook's cardinal sin is not sharing our information, but stripping so much of the meaning from it and taking from us the chance to make real connections.