Facebook is more busted than working...

This summer I realized that for me, a guy whose job it is to be on the Internet day in and day out (I webmaster a very large online enthusiast community), I was falling way behind and getting out of touch with user technology especially the sharing and social aspects of the Internet. I'm pretty good with the back-end technology, but had traditionally put down what I thought were fad technologies - no longer.

So, I started to explore web tools that could help me do some of the things I was already doing, like sharing nifty web sites with my users and friends which took me to the Delicious.com bookmarking service. I also took time to do a total rewrite of my own personal home page (Scott-Paterson.com) which led me to wonder if I could get my Delicious.com bookmarks dynamically updated on my home page - of course - this was being done all over the web already in the form of Lifestreaming, so I incorporated all my various versions of my online self into a lifestream (AIM, Delicious, Twitter, Flickr, Amazon, Vox Blog, Last.fm, Netflix, YouTube, etc etc). I also picked up my blog writing. I was a writer by training in college and I did a ton of it for work and I like doing it, so this would be one way to stay in writing shape, although my writing style is naturally rather casual. Anyway, I really liked what I saw, but to get to the point...

I opened a Facebook account thanks to a long lost college friend and my wife. I like Facebook. Half my family is on Facebook (why didn't they tell me they were - their Internet brother - I'm still trying to figure that one out). Now that I've been studying Facebook for all of a week, I've been running into problems left and right. Every other thing I look at seems busted. How many people are on Facebook? 45 Million or more? They get 250,000 sign ups every day? It dawned on me that Facebook no longer has to provide a decent service or make sure that they're not hosting slew of broken third party applications. The thing is a monster force of its own. It's like a black hole. It only has to sit there and do nothing yet continue to grow at an event-horizon pace. On my profile page, Facebook provides an integrated service in which it will automatically import Delicious links (Busted), Flickr photos (Broken), YouTube Video (Not Working), and RSS/Blog Feeds (okay, SOMETMES works). So I tried two third party apps for Delicious links, a number of RSS feeders, YouTube apps, etc etc, hardly anything at all is working in there unless you do it manually... so I tried to share this Hugs Campaign video from YouTube today (easily shareable here)...