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A more accurate use of Facebook these days.

This pretty much sums up my usage of Facebook lately. Google+ is ridiculously busy now. I can’t imagine what kind of a madhouse it will be like when it opens up permanently to everybody.

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Facebook has historically tried to conform status updates to a complete sentence; for those who were on Facebook back in 2007, you might remember how each update always started with “Jane Doe is,” which seriously cramped users’ styles after the advent of Twitter and its comparatively loosey-goosey free-form status updates that required no command of subject-verb agreement (provided it fit in 140 characters). In summer of 2008 Facebook relented, dropping the “is” requirement but still placing status updates next to a person’s name, as if the name started the sentence. Gradually, people (primarily Twitter users and crossposters) ignored the structure and went on with their lives, though I often continue to spot old-school Facebook users starting status updates as if their name was the first part of it.

The coder in me always found Facebook’s attempt at conforming data enamoring; I often enjoyed the challenge of making statuses fit into Facebook’s syntax (much as I for a while attempted to make every Tweet fit into 140 characters). I thought it flowed well and gave the site some character. But times change, and I likely represent quite a minority of the 500 million+ users on the sprawling social giant, especially since I actually agree with the font size changes (and if you don’t, here’s a utility for you).

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So The Great Facebook URL Rush of 2009 is over, and in the end, my Personal Brand remains intact: facebook.com/jaredwsmith. We now return to your regularly scheduled geekery, already in progress.

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In some ways, this reflects a major shift in how people use and interact with Facebook. The area where you enter status updates has been made into a more ambiguous “publisher” which will post status updates, notes, photos, and the like. It’s very FriendFeed-esque in this regard. A lot’s been made of a comparison to Twitter, but I think FriendFeed is a far more effective analogy because of the range of items you can share (regardless of linking, a tweet is a tweet is a tweet — 140 characters, no more, no less). But as Facebook always likes to do, they’ve watered it down and made it weird in some ways. Facebook was pretty straightforward to use because a status update was a status update, a photo post was a photo post, and the like. It’s all been melded together now, and that’s going to take a lot of time for a lot of folks to get used to.

The biggest problem with the publisher, though, is how inconsistently it’s rolled out throughout the site. At first glance, it seems as if Facebook is making a landmark shift towards Twitter-like functionality in its status updates by moving away from third-person updates (such as “Jared is fabbing tacos”):

The new Facebook publisher for the homepage and profile pages.

Dive into the Friends pages, though, and you get the same ol’ third-person status updater:

The old-school status updater on the Friends page (Status Updates sub-tab). Huh?

Facebook is basically making for high school relationship drama here by sending many mixed signals. I, for one, would prefer that they commit one way or the other — if, indeed, they want their status updates to be more Twitter-like, I’ll gladly oblige them by re-bridging my full Twitter feed, because it would make sense to do so. (In January, I argued that third-person status updates make Twitter-to-Facebook prohibitive.) Right now, the implementation is confusing. Facebook for so many years has forced the third-person format and to suddenly apply so much ambiguity to it by leaving it in some places (including the iPhone and BlackBerry apps) and changing it in others is a real head-scratcher.

One thing that is somewhat cool but watered down in ways only Facebook can is how “Likes” are now used to populate the “Highlights” pane on the right — which is, of course, headlined by an advertisement. You wouldn’t notice it was an ad except for the “sponsored” text underneath, though. If Facebook wants to borrow properly from FriendFeed, they should have likes and comments promote things within the stream and keep it in my view rather than relegating it to the right side. I still can’t keep track of what I “like,” so it’s ineffective as a tool to reference things later (something unheralded about FriendFeed likes).

My big takeaway from this? Facebook’s innovating less and less. I don’t know how else to put it, but there it is. Smaller, nimbler startups have outfoxed Facebook, and they’re now trying to play catchup and bring those features over to its own walled garden. For the first time in really a long time, the social Web has shifted and Facebook didn’t lead the charge. Things like photo tagging, News Feed, and the like pushed Facebook to the bleeding edge and forced change all across the social media spectrum (look how many sites have News Feed-like features now, such as Last.fm and, for that matter, MySpace). Now, Facebook is retooling itself to be more of a Twitter/FriendFeed equivalent amongst friends. Certainly more people put their eyes on Facebook than Twitter and FriendFeed probably see in a week, but they are no longer setting the agenda (at least right now). That could have major implications down the road as Facebook could easily be a gateway to services like Twitter and FriendFeed. While Facebook does indeed have a great deal of users, nothing is too big to fail; and things begin to falter when they stop innovating. Swing on down to the Chamber of Irrelevance and ask Netscape about that one — or Friendster, for that matter. The Internet Explorer team is quickly learning what this feeling is like, and I suspect that if you fast forward a year, and you might be asking MySpace the same thing. On the Internet, it’s always the smaller and nimbler creature that eventually wins out; and I’m beginning to wonder if Facebook’s hitting that apex. Time will tell.

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I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but over the last couple months, I’ve more narrowly focused the blog on social media topics. There’s a lot about Facebook. There’s a cubic crapton about Twitter, all intermingled with some Brightkite, FriendFeed, and identi.ca. Sure, I’ve written about the Super Bowl, but I’ve kept the topics pretty narrowly focused. This is a side effect of my using Twitter; items that I might have posted as “asides” here often end up there because of its sheer convenience. Another thing I’ve discovered: FriendFeed is a stellar way to micro-blog, especially if I need more than 140 characters. It can offer instant feedback and viral promotion via “likes,” and the conversation there is tough to top right now. It’s not just using different services, either. Two of my big topics here of late have been Serious Business show notes and weather, and I’ve shifted both these items off to their own sites in order to let them flourish.

So where does that leave the ol’ homestead? Scrambling to adjust, and reacquire its voice.

I offer a confession: I’ve never been happy with my blog’s voice. I’ve tried different formats over the years; rapid-fire blogging, wall-to-wall weather coverage, daily roundups of newsy items — but I’ve never found anything that’s fit. One constant has remained (until recently) — it was eclectic. That eclectic nature led to chatter over the years that my blog needs to “focus” so that it can be somewhat predictable and be authoritative on something. It’s the classic struggle between being good at a number of things or being really good at a couple things. I’m willing to give anything a try, so I did — and you know, it’s kind of sucked the fun out of it. I realized that I sounded like a broken record when I went back through my recent posts several times over when I was making tweaks to my archives yesterday; and, well, that’s not me. Now, I’m not saying that I don’t enjoy writing about social media topics or that I’m going to quit writing about them; no, I’m a big fan of those technologies and I’ll continue to write about them, because they are very much relevant in the world according to Jared Smith. What I am saying is that there is obviously much more to the world according to Jared Smith than Twitter and Facebook. I’m a big fan of the Xark! approach to blogging: There are no unrelated topics. I used to be really good about this, but Twitter and other technologies are like the tall blonde walking outside with her food at Panera (where I’m writing this): They’ve stolen my attention. And, thus, there’s a lot of writing about Twitter on the blog, but all the details about my travels, trials, tribulations, etc. remain in Twitter and don’t find their way here. And that’s a shame — there’s a lot that deserves documentation beyond 140 characters.

So, I did a few things yesterday (aside from making the archives more accessible): First, I made the asides simpler and a lot easier to look at (in my mind). That’s one thing that I think I’m finally happy with that I haven’t been since I introduced the site. So, because I don’t consider them an eyesore, I’ll use those asides a bit more. The second thing is, knowing my habits, I’ve been working to expand integration of my FriendFeed. I’ve moved it from the sidebar to the blog’s homepage underneath the recent entries. I know it’s a bit buried there; there’s a chance I may eschew the Twitter homepage widget in favor of the FriendFeed widget. Time will tell.

For now, though, it’s an awful nice day out. Time to do a little living.

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Over the past few days, we have received a lot of good feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.

It’s the prudent thing for Facebook to do while they weigh the ramifications of the terms. Kudos to them for recognizing a mistake and taking steps to fix it.

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