Jared Hightower: Wishing for a better alternative to Facebook

For me, “I’m going to quit Facebook” carries the same connotation as flying pigs.

I signed up for a Facebook account several years ago, right after the Myspace bust. All the cool kids were doing it, and I wanted to be a cool kid too. For a few years, Facebook was all the rage among my friends and even my family.

Now, however, it seems the Facebook train has left the station and is embarking on a harrowing journey to its end. According to new data by British anthropologist Daniel Miller, fewer teenagers are using Facebook, and instead are using more specialized social media such as Twitter and Instagram.

But we’re still using it. I’m still using it.

What happened to striving to be hip and young? Do what the kids are doing and you’ll live forever, right? As it turns out, I can’t get away from Facebook. Even through all of the annoying updates and all of the “Facebook drama,” I still can’t tear my eyes away until I find better social media to use.

It recently dawned on me that the only reason I use Facebook is to stay in touch with my friends. I sign in, read what they have to say, look at what they have to show, contribute my bit, become bored and leave. I don’t play Facebook games. I stopped updating my favorite books, musicians and films years ago. I subscribe to a few feeds, like The Onion and NPR, but I can just as easily point my browser to their websites.

If I had no friends, I would have no reason to use Facebook. It doesn’t provide any service that could be considered useful or meaningful. The connections I have with my friends are the only things keeping me on Facebook. It’s almost as if Facebook’s business model is to profit off of peoples’ friendships.

If there were some other social media platform that promoted only relevant and non-intrusive advertisements, posted no annoying sponsored posts, provided no always-on DRM (distraction from real motivation), included file-sharing and group organizing tools and had all of my friends using it - I’d be sold.

Oh, and it mustn’t watch my every move and collect tons of unnecessary data about me. Sorry, Google Plus.

There are plenty of alternative social networks, but none of them quite have the file sharing and group organizing tools while also being accessible, useful and user-friendly. Twitter has micro-blogging, which is nice if I want to send a 140-character update to my friends. However, it isn’t very good for one-on-one or group interaction or for posting an update viewable only by specific audiences.

Google Groups has file sharing and group organizing tools and doesn’t require any more personal information, but the service is styled as a dry and uninviting forum of the late 1990s and early 2000s. It’s good for having discussions with a single audience about a single topic, but not for personal networking.

Diaspora looks interesting, as it’s a self-hosted, open-source networking platform that works almost like Facebook. The drawback is that Diaspora requires someone (or a group, I suppose, if your friends are cool like that) to shell out the money and invest in a computer with a server that’s always provided with a high-speed Internet connection - and all the accompanying electricity. Even then, one must convince one’s friends to move away from Facebook onto the private server. Unless everyone in your network is dedicated and technically-oriented, it isn’t worth the investment.

And then there’s Path. Path has a unique service that is geared toward users who invite their close friends and family, with a limit of 150 contacts. To balance this, users may choose to post privately or to four other social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Tumblr.

However, Path has a glaring problem apparent from the moment of signing up - it’s only accessible on a “smart” device: iPhone, iPad, Android, Kindle Fire. I don’t have any of those - sorry to burst the first-world bubble, but not everyone has a smartphone. There is no interface accessible from a standard computer, and the barrier to entry for many people becomes an expensive phone and an expensive data service. Even if I did have a smart device, I wouldn’t feel comfortable leaving all of my friends without smartphones behind on Facebook.

Note that I didn’t include Tumblr or Pinterest in my list of potential Facebook replacements. Tumblr has tumblogs, which are great for sharing stories and interesting Web finds, but not for communicating with a small group or for having instantaneous interaction. Pinterest is a great tool for finding and collecting interesting things, but aside from sharing the images I pin, it has none of the common features of social networking - and really shouldn’t be called a social network. It has a lot of visitors, but so do Pandora and NPR.

I want a simple social network with one purpose: to communicate with my friends. No games, no advertisements, no sensitive personal data, no tracking, no empty feeling of wasting time. All of the potential replacements will do that, but they don’t quite have the right functionality or accessibility to actually replace Facebook.

I’d like to leave for something less life-consuming, but until there’s something better that catches the collective eye of my friends, I can’t put the ‘book down.

Jared Hightower is a third-year majoring in information technology.