I’m finding Facebook a bore. I resent the ‘walled garden’ approach which lures ‘friends’ to send me messages inside FB — which then prompts an email from FB telling me that so-and-so has sent me a message which can only be seen by logging into FB — when all along s/he could have sent me a perfectly good direct email. The only feature I really like is the status updates of my friends — but I could just as easily get that from something like Twitter. (Later: hang on — I can get the status updates via an RSS feed. Why didn’t I think of that earlier?)

The other irritating limitation of FB is the fact that one exists only in a single context. In real life, I have friends and acquaintances in a range of different — and only barely overlapping — worlds. If FB could accommodate this complexity, then perhaps it would be more useful. But it can’t.

I’m not alone in thinking like this — see this blog post pointed to by Bill Thompson…

I lost control over my MySpace ages ago. I have long since given up responding to private messages on most SNSes. I had to quit LinkedIn after I got lambasted for refusing to forward requests from people that I didn’t know to people who are so stretched thin that I am more interested in hugging them than requesting something of them. I don’t know how to be “me” on Twitter because I can’t figure out how to manage so many different contexts. I find it funny when journalists ask me what SNS I use. I’m on most of the English ones, but they always grow to push me away. Each had an initial context for me, but each one grew and lost that context…