Business Talk

The Associated Press is reporting that Syria has blocked its citizens' access to the popular Facebook social networking web site. No official reason has yet been given, but the A.P. report suggests that it may have to do with Damascus worrying that Israelis were using the site to somehow infiltrate Syrian social networks.

While that's kind of mystifying — what would be the point, exactly? — it caught The Lede's attention for being another data point in a growing pattern: On all sides, people seem ready to conclude that Facebook is becoming A Bad Thing.

Facebook has only itself to blame for the biggest recent dent to its credibility, the Beacon tracking and advertising feature it rolled out in November. Howls of complaint from Facebook members and privacy advocates, who said Beacon was sneaky, intrusive and crass, forced the company to make significant changes, and Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chief executive, apologized publicly this week for the whole mess.

Naturally, any Web site that attracts tens of millions of users is bound to draw its share of critics and haters, and so will almost anything the site does to try to monetize those eyeballs, evil or not.

But the qualms about Facebook range well beyond the spyware-ishness of Beacon and the aversion in Damascus to online socializing with Those People.

For one thing, some are beginning to conclude that a Web site built around a kind of mass exhibitionism might not bring out the best in everyone. Facebook-using respondents to a Jossip.com online survey in October reported all manner of complaints about fellow Facebookers, and at the same time, plenty of cynical misbehavior on the respondents' own part. As Misty Harris of CanWest News Service wrote about the results on Canada.com, under the headline "Survey: Facebook Friends Annoying":

The popular networking site … is revealed as a minefield of etiquette blunders, social gaffes and narcissistic indulgences to which the offending parties are completely oblivious, much to the aggravation of their "friends."

From the people who post pictures on a purely selfish basis — a group shot, for instance, where they look like a supermodel but their online pals look like something the supermodel threw up - to the folks who poach from other people's friend lists, it seems there's no limit to the ways in which to annoy on the site.

And then there are all the ways wearing your personal life on your digital sleeve can bedevil you. One of the Facebook members quoted on Canada.com described how the site's "in a relationship/not in a relationship" indication can do that:

"It's turned into this big thing, where if you just start dating someone you have to have this serious discussion: Should we change our Facebook status? Is it too soon? And then if you break up, you have to change your status again and have that pathetic little broken heart next to your name on the (Facebook news) feed. No, thank you."

Beyond such complications, Cory Doctorow, coauthor of the Boing Boing blog, makes a case in a recent column for Information Week that all fast-growing online social networks, including Facebook, must inevitably self-destruct, because sooner or later using it will stop being fun and start being embarrassing:

In the real world, we don't articulate our social networks. Imagine how creepy it would be to wander into a co-worker's cubicle and discover the wall covered with tiny photos of everyone in the office, ranked by "friend" and "foe," with the top eight friends elevated to a small shrine decorated with Post-It roses and hearts. And yet, there's an undeniable attraction to corralling all your friends and friendly acquaintances, charting them and their relationship to you.

[ … ] By the time you've reached your forties, chances are you're out-of-touch with more friends than you're in-touch with: Old summer-camp chums, high-school mates, ex-spouses and their families, former co-workers, college roomies, dot-com veterans…. Getting all those people back into your life is a full-time job and then some.

You'd think that Facebook would be the perfect tool for handling all this. It's not. For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there's a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I'd cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, "Am I your friend?" yes or no, this instant, please.

He proposes a parallel to Brooks's Law: "Adding more users to a social network increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance."

"As more users flock to it, the chances that the person who precipitates your exodus will find you increases. Once that happens, poof, away you go — and Facebook joins SixDegrees, Friendster and their pals on the scrapheap of net.history."