The beginning of the end?

Facebook is now very rapidly becoming unfit for purpose, and that purpose was to network socially.

I found it initially an invaluable resource as a promotional tool.

I could promote gigs that friends were putting on/playing. 

Gigs I was putting on myself.

Spread friends blogs and interesting comments.

Spread my own blog updates about as well.

I could even have huge political debates with people who understood what I was saying, and don't think that all this countries problems are rooted in immigration and unemployment as the Sun and Daily Mail would have us believe.

I even found new friends with common interests.

All of this was done with relative ease.

Of course as it got busier and busier there was the downside that what I was trying to communicate with everyone else was being lost in the deluge of info, but I could live with that.

Over the last few months in the lead up to the shares being floated it all seems to have went tits up though.

The timeline change over was the catalyst, and a tipping point was reached.

I recent weeks I have been unable to link to my blog and allegedly this is down to FBs unhappiness with Blogger who are part of the Google family.

It's now working again.

It started working after I sent some emails. I didn't get a reply of course, but instead, coincidentally, I could post again.

Imagine that. 

Canadians were apparently the first to feel the wrath of FB in this, and to post blog content they had to change their URL to get around the publicly unmentioned block.

Now there is this push for people to pay for their posts to be read by a wider audience.

Some consider that this is just for businesses, but in the US people have had notifications asking for $5 so that more than 20% of their friends can view an update.

I ask you? Why are only 20% seeing them in the first place when they are posted for all to see?

They're not really unsolicited as if you don't want to see them then un-friend the poster.

Here in the UK would it be fair to say that we have all experienced missing posts because of some filtering system that no one can really understand?

It's turning into what we colloquially call 'a pile of pish'.

What people are seeming to forget is that FB was/is funded by ad revenue.

That hasn't vanished. It is still there and even more aggressively being pushed.

This is why it was free.

So why is it looking possible that when they say free that they mean a very limited version is free and not what we have come to be expect.

Well I would say that's because they floated their shares and now the race is on to rip the arse out of it and accrue as much mullah as possible for their shareholders.

Every angle that could make a buck must be explored and then exploited in the lust to expand a profit margin.

So who else is currently a bit miffed with it and what is the alternative?

FB was the alternative to MySpace, but they haven't learnt anything from the mass migration from there to FB that was rooted in users unhappiness.

So is there another social networking alternative looming on the horizon?