Jason's exhausted by Facebook. OM calls it Facebook Fatigue.
Do you know how many friend requests I have waiting for me? None.
Why? Because I don't ask people to connect to me who aren't my friend and don't link to my Facebook in my feed everyday.
I mean, what's the point of being friends with all of my blog readers of Facebook? Do I want to see the latest photos uploaded by the 2000 people who read my blog? Um, sorry, not really.
When Fred says "[Jason is] drawing attention to the problems with Facebook", he's really not seeing how the average person on Facebook, which is still a college student or recent grad, is using it. I picked out the first five actual college students that I'm friends with and counted up their apps. They average less than 3 a person. Fred's got about a dozen or so, as do I, but I'd never think I was the average user. A lot of these TechMeme All-Stars are extrapolating their own experience... all six weeks of it, and making judgments on the whole platform. Man, if I was a college kid interested in getting hired by a VC firm, I'd start a blog all about how college kids actually use Facebook. I'd be doing polls of my friends, video interviews, etc. I think it would be an eyeopener for all of us, frankly.
Hearing Jason complain about all his requests is like when your older cousin comes and plays with all your stuff, breaks it, then hands it back to you and says, "This doesn't work... its busted."
You know who really knows something about Facebook? danah... because she actually spends much of her time talking to the kids who are on it. There's no substitute for getting out there and talking to young people, whether its in a classroom or in focus groups or whatever. My time spent in the classroom last semester was incredibly valuable for me to talk to students about how they actually use the internet. At least Fred has a few kids of his own he can talk to and stay grounded in.