Mourning facebook

I'm thinking about decommissioning this blog. I don't use it often enough and don't really have anything interesting to say. And, perhaps more pertinently, I have a feeling that web 2.0 is over.

My own relationship with the www has always been closely related to my residence, and works roughly like this: live in Dublin, don't use the web that much; live outside of Dublin, become one of those net cafe rats, scribbling away on strange keyboards at unsociable hours, upside down exclamation marks and circumflexes all over the place. I haven't developed any lifetime habits: when I was in Central America and experiencing new things every day - and furthermore when I had hundreds of people to stay in touch with and a limited amount of time to write - all of this turned me into a committed blogger. But once I zipped back into the same timezone as my friends, well, what was the point? I've blogged I think 5 times since coming home.

I think that's how blogging works, a bit. Some people get it, and keep it (big shout out to Shazzle); the rest of us peter out once we realise that we have not a lot to say.

But there did seem to be a frenzy of interactivity last summer - if you'll forgive me for coming over all nostalgic about what was in effect the day before yesterday -and it pivoted around Facebook. Facebook is over now, and without it, I seem to have lost all the other elements of web 2.0 that interested me.

Round about last Christmas, we all got very exercised about the things we lefties get exercised about. That Guardian article about the evil owners of Facebook got posted on every blog and homepage around. The cynics looked smug, and said they'd never trusted it anyway, were glad they'd never signed up. And people sloped off, a little embarrassed, leaving their undeletable profiles in the ether, never to be updated, never to be erased. Facebook was bad because it was invasive, another consumer machine, eating up your personal details and procesing them to sell you Givenchy fragrance. It was bad because shadowy corporate types were making money out of what was supposed to be a pure virtual space. Slowly, we also twigged that it was bad because there was no place to hide from friends we didn't want and reunions we hadn't invited.

Now Facebook is just a shell. The only people who go there are Americans and the friends I accepted most grudgingly, or in greatest confusion. Nobody sends me messages any more. My notifications are almost exclusively of the "Sarty Jenna-Bowman is friends with Josie Dinger-Chuncha" variety. The others are those darn applications where you spend 3 minutes doing a brain dead quiz only to discover that you have to invite 20 other people to do it to get the results. So you invite the people you see least on your friends list, or the ones whose judgement would least upset you. I get about 4 of those a week still.

So Facebook is shit. Fine. But I want to mourn it just a little. I loved catching up with all those old people, and welcoming them back into my universe (Nicole Nascenzi! Hugh Delany! Eoin Ward!). On dull nights in Tegus, on my own in a huge house, I loved hanging out in this laid back place, reading snippets of articles from my friends, looking at people's photos. Once we had established our profiles and put up our photos, far away people were near enough to chat - and never before or since I was a regular Facebook user did I use my gmail chat so much.

The only reason that Facebook is shit is because nobody goes there anymore. And everybody left for very good, pure, moral reasons. But in the frenzy of Facebook-condemnation, I think we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater. I liked social networking. I liked status updates, photo albums, notes and events. I organised my coming home party through Facebook, and it was a riot.

Now nobody emails me any more, I don't blog, and I haven't posted photos anywhere in months. My last status update was "Carol storms out of Facebook in a huff". Trouble is, now I don't know where to go.