I'm socially concerned....

....about social networking. Here's the thing. Facebook went from being the next best thing since sliced bread to a privacy invading beast that has sold our souls to marketing. Don't get me wrong, Facebook has some great things going for it, but it is losing what were once the faithful to alternatives. And that's where I have some concerns.

Back in the day, it was IRC. Then came ICQ. Then it was Messenger. Eventually, we all migrated to Facebook. Twitter threatened for a second, but then most people realized (I think) that Twitter was like a side dish to Facebook. It was perfect for micro-blogging, but Facebook still made it easiest to share information, pictures, videos, links and so
forth.

But now that the Facebook backlash has begun, what is a fringe internetizen to do? There's the Anti-facebook - Diaspora, Google Buzz, Orkut, Bebo, Friendster and others.

Assuming you make the decision to abandon Facebook, the problem is - which one do you switch to? Are all of your friends going to jumps ship? Are they all going to follow you to the same alternative that you picked? It really doesn't pay to switch social networks unless you can be sure that you're going off to the next big thing. It's kind of like changing pubs. Unless the friends you've been hanging with need to be dumped en masse, you're not likely to change pubs if you're not sure all of your pub-mates are coming with you.

So it is possible that no matter how bad or annoying Facebook gets, it may have achieved critical mass in that it's too late to switch to something else and expect your posse to come along. The only real alternative left may be to revert back to that ancient social network we used to rely on in the days before the interwebs - real life.