As Katie Hafner writes in the NY Times, a number of people are taking a break from Facebook (or trying to).
Call it a Facebreak.
Facebook is all about scale.
Hundreds of millions of users.
And 10 billion minutes spent on Facebook each day.
But for us Facebook users, time does not scale.
Every minute we spend on Facebook is one minute less we spend reading a book, watching TV, sleeping, working.
It used to be that the Internet was all about saving time.
Amazon freed us from driving to the mall.
Online bill pay freed us from writing checks and searching for stamps.
And then along came Facebook and all those minutes saved were quickly reallocated.
I’m exaggerating, of course.
But I think “free” online applications in the years ahead are going to be viewed as not quite so free as in years past.
Time is money, after all. And we only have so much of it to spend.
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Well I was never sucked into the vast viral time-wasters AKA the “unlockable” “leveling-up” “social games” and whenever people used the FB notes feature at all, it was usually just some dumb meme chains, so when I go on Facebook at all, it’s usually to check statuses and then administrate some groups. What’s more, all this fuss about how much time people spend on Facebook is utterly silly. Who cares? Is it anyone’s business? It shouldn’t be. What should matter is Facebook giving the users a quality experience, but I haven’t seen much evidence of that, but then, that’s just my opinion.