Agreed. Facebook has turned into a stream of blabber and pictures of people's kids (no offence).
What is NOT noisy is:
* Path (just my close friends)
* Pair (just my girlfriend)
* Google+ (the "what's hot" news feed is actually pretty interesting)
What is NOT noisy is:
* Path (just my close friends)
* Pair (just my girlfriend)
* Google+ (the "what's hot" news feed is actually pretty interesting)
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-57372885-52/path-shares-ph...
So I was a bit confused when people would mention FB ads, and I was like: where are you people seeing these ads? This confusion reigned for a long time until recently, when one day I opened up my GM userscript manager panel and saw the FB ad blocker. Oops! So, for me, ads are not an issue (so far).
If family or friends want to reach me, email has held up surprisingly well over the years.
Part of it (for me), is that communications with my wife are via a separate stack, separate notifications that are easier to manage, and the ability to share more than you can in MMS (a silly sketch, or a map location).
Pair cuts out all the "noise" of other systems and gives you something that makes you feel like communications with that one other person are something more unique and "out of band" than all your other notification streams.
Personally, I haven't figured out if Pair is a product or a feature, but that doesn't really matter to me right now.