But getting back to Facebook, I personally don’t fan many people, and many of my friends appear not to fan much either. I am not saying that this does not exist at all in my large social network, but it is not that important. Will people evolve to it (designing interactions have to look at what people will do in the future)? I actually think otherwise, and I have my reasons for thinking so.

What I find more interesting in Facebook is that I am sharing social time with friends, hearing their stories, seeing their adventures in photos. This goes back to the source of entertainment, a social event. I also trust their recommendations on music to listen to and go to events that they are going to or recommend. That in itself is pretty amazing.

I also want to point out that many people I know are against ‘friending’ celebrities, even ones they know. It’s like opt-in spam and does not give the level of intimacy that a more selective (celebs may friend just to sell their image and for promo) friend would give.

Twitter is growing, but it also has a lot of hype that has made many of us join, but the actual experience is not very fulfilling. The noise level is very high, the sound bites not very interesting. It’s basically a spamming interface, but those with the most status get the most followers, creating the same problems we have with all old media.

Actually people today are ‘tolerating’ Facebook rather than loving the new interface. It isn’t just because of the change, it’s because it does not do what it was doing best. Now that many have committed to it by having much of their social world in it, they will have to go along with whatever changes and directions Facebook chooses to go. But something new may come along, and Facebook has opened the market finally.

And now my US$0.02: even though Facebook has not officially gone asymmetric yet, in a way it already has and it’s not about pages. In the very Twitter-like timeline view, you can selectively hide contacts whose lifestream you are not so interested in, and it persists.

Symetric – follow-follow
Asymetric – Non-following contribution (called lurkers by Gartner Group)
Hybrid – Follow on one side, No Follow on the other.

My opinion: For FB to compete, they have to accomodate the hybrid as proposed above. In some regard, we have to be masters of our domain (in Seinfield terms.)

Great post Josh!