The Belgian Trotter

There’s no denying it. I don’t like Facebook and I never will. Some will answer by saying "why do you use it?", "Do don’t need to use it". While this is of course absolutely true, I must point out I like to get in touch with old friends. Since I’ve traveled and lived in a lot of countries around the world, I find it very handy to get updated information on friends. So yes, Facebook has a practical use as well.

Also since Facebook is one of the most popular social networking sites in Europe, most of my friends have an account on it…

But what I do not like about Facebook is:

• the design: I never understood how Facebook appeals to new users. It’s plain ugly. There aren’t any clean rounded edges. No fancy Ajax controls, no nothing
• Spam: while you cannot possibly know this when joining the site at first, Facebook is an extremely annoying spam-engine. It’s amazing how much mail you can get from Facebook daily. I, again, need to point out a lot of these mails can be disabled but you still get invitations or requests to use an application someone else in your friend circle installed. IMHO, Facebook should be much strict in their "allowed" application list.
•  performance: Facebook is painfully slow!

 

It seems all this isn’t enough: Facebook announced a new feature: CHAT. (scream!)

The launch date for Facebook Chat is set in the nebulous area of “the coming weeks,” according to Product Manager Peter Deng. The Chat will function as an overlay, similar to GTalk in GMail that sits in a UI at the bottom of the browser screen. It can also, like GTalk, be popped out into a separate window. 
So except all of you to get even more mails asking you to join a chat!

 

On the other side, Facebook is aware of their privacy, communication policy: 
According to Matt Cohler, Facebook wants to create more ‘granular privacy tools’ and an easy to use product in the process. He also outlined some of the difficulties that Facebook has had as it has grown. When Facebook was started, he explained, it was geared towards the US college student niche. 
Well I’ve got one word here: scalability!

I’m currently trying out another social networking site: PLAXO

Why?

Plaxo is using Google’s OpenSocial API!!! 
Plaxo, online calendar and address book, has the honour of being the first to implement OpenSocial into a service and go live with it. It’s implemented in Plaxo Pulse, a service that lets you see social networking activities of people in your address book, like changes in their profiles, new Flickr photos they’ve added, etc.

For People not knowing anything about OpenSocial: it’s Google’s initiative to provide a single point of entrance to as much social sites as possible. This way people joining on social site1 could contact with people on social site2. Now how great is that!

And guess what: according to Plaxo using the social API is starting to deliver some results:

 

The social networking site war for users just got even more interesting