[Note: We had some responses from our listeners concerning a recent episode in which we were fairly harsh on Facebook.  This post grew out of those conversations.]

Why do we hate on Facebook so much?  I will admit that I think sometimes we get a bit carried away with it.  Its cool to hate the big guys and we fall into that too sometimes.  However, with Facebook there is something more than just the David and Goliath effect.

Facebook is a great one-stop way to keep up with friends (especially more distant ones), share what is going on in your life and so on.  Insofar as Facebook curates those interactions, I think it is a wonderful service – and one which Twitter really will never be able to replace (though Buzz might have some potential there, especially with its ability to unify various social network streams).

Twitter is a fundamentally different animal.  For me Twitter is less like a website and more like a TV. I am mostly interested in what is happening *now* rather than what happened an hour ago.  So for people/sites/feeds that are interesting to me, but sort of an overwhelming stream of information, its a good way to get interesting things without having to wade through their hundred daily posts in Google Reader.

My distaste for Facebook is not as much what it *is* but how its run.  Facebook has a good core idea, but other than that, the company seems to have hardly any interest in the actual community of people who use it, what they want, or how they want to interact with the service.  Most other social networks (Digg, Reddit, Twitter, even Craigslist) are very sensitive to the community.  They know that if they annoy the community it will go away, but more importantly, the founders of most of these companies actually feel like the community is a community of people who want to use the community in a particular way.

Facebook on the other hand, has a long history of utterly changing what its about (usually in the direction of making information that was once private, or at least semi-private to be public.  The original news feed was one example of this. Of course anyone could go on and see if your relationship status had changed before the news feed, but then Facebook decided you would want to broadcast that out to everyone. Most recently the change to make your friends public was a similar breach in the implicit social contract Facebook has with its users.

Facebook feels to me like they see the direction the market is going (feeds, status updates, and now it looks like they’re going to add geolocation too) and just forces it on the community because its good business, but not in a way that is ammenable to the community, or even really very beneficial to them.  I generally look forward to updates of most services/apps I use because it adds new functionality to me.  But everytime I hear that Facebook is changing something I groan inwardly because I know that I’m not going to like it and it probably will not add much to my use of Facebook.  Also, as the local tech guru to most of my friends, it is going to mean many repetitive conversations on the new changes, and how to deal with them.

What can Facebook do to turn this around?  Facebook needs to choose what it does and focus on doing that well.  I feel like Facebook is simply chasing the moment and trying to do a bit of everything.  It ends up doing a lot of things, but doing them poorly.  You can share photos, but not as well as on Flickr. You can share status updates, but not as easily as on Twitter.  You can comment on other posts, but your comments get lost in the stream.  Stop changing around the interface/core idea of what Facebook is every 18 months.