I guess Email or text messages are no longer cool?
For example, just last week I had an acquaintance who was potentially taking an internship in the city I moved to after I graduated college. This is an acquaintance that I haven't seen in over five years, and was never close with. The kind of person you'd be 100% never seeing again, since we had basically lost touch, minus the whole "we're Facebook friends" aspect.
Granted, I know one of the major gripes about Facebook on HN is that having a lot of friends on Facebook facilitates a lot of useless spam about people you don't quite care about. I totally understand this view.
But on the other hand, I learned that this acquaintance of mine might be stopping in the city I'm in, so far away from our hometown, and being the adult that I am and getting older and older by the minute, knowing just how hard it is to make and maintain friendships as you get older, I decided to give this acquaintance a call (on Facebook of course!) to see if they were free to meetup.
Email and text message have a different feel and offer different features.
I totally disagree with the things parts of Facebook is doing, and I wish they gave half a damn about where they are driving us.
Email and text messages both suffer from the problem that they are controlled by the sender.
Facebook flips this. The wall reflects what I want to see.
It might have a hypocrisy problem. People will typically claim to like certain things (high-status cultural artifacts) while mostly consuming other things (trash TV, fast food etc). However, it doesn't benefit from driving people away.
"a tool that is explicitly designed to maximize your desire for coming back to it"
WTF! They want to serve me well? Those bastards!
You know what keeps me coming back? My sister calling me to tell me that there's photos and a video on her Facebook page.
It's about enabling a different type of relationship where you are sharing your life with people you don't necessarily want to have a constant conversation with.