A number of factors are involved in asking this question. Of late the media seems to have much to say about Facebook’s invasive nature. It’s getting everywhere, from you being able to log into Facebook to comment on a blog like this one to the iPhone app now offering to sync your handset contact book with your friends list. The press is also openly suggesting that, with over 300 million registered users, Facebook may be reaching some kind of critical mass beyond which it can only decline.

There may be something in this. When everyone and his dog had registered on Friends Reunited, that was the turning point for a site that went into rapid freefall as people simply got bored and moved onto the next thing (whatever that was, it might have been Facebook, I can’t recall). Like Facebook, Friends Reunited commanded a ridiculous price and, for a time, buyers stumped up the money and shares in the venture changed hands for huge sums. Its value then plummeted and a lot of people lost a lot of moolah. The same story was repeated time and again with sites such as lastminute.com. During the first dotcom boom millionaires were quickly made, some of them getting out in time with the money in a grab-bag and others not so lucky.

What if venture capitalists and other fortune-seekers finally cotton on to the fact that all these social networking sites rise quickly in popularity and value, only to crash within the space of four or five years? With a worldwide recession still going on, could we be about to see a second dotcom crash like the one in 2000? It’s possible. Many people who once spent all their time on Facebook are now using Twitter, with their Facebook accounts merely ticking over and visited only once in a while. Still more, like me, are sick of the fairly recent trend for games on Facebook to post the most stupid and senseless status updates relating to game activity that make no sense to anyone but the person whose account is effectively being hijacked for the posting of surreal nonsense, only it isn’t a case of hijacking at all: people give their consent for this to happen.

I keep blocking game status updates on Facebook whenever they crop up, only for new games to be adopted by people. The slog of blocking game status updates is tiresome in the extreme, with no end in sight. Last night I decided to start posting fake game status updates to my profile to show others just how annoying they are, but with a dash of humour thrown into the mix that is entirely lacking in the real, lame, game status updates. Stuff like,

[name] is wrestling with a large octopus.

[name] has won a donkey on the funny farm.

[name] has adopted a baby baboon. It needs feeding while he’s away.

[name] has gone up 15 levels.

[name] is singing to a mermaid on Fantasy Sad Island.

and the one that’s had a few people in stitches,

[name] just won 10 Green Shield Stamps by killing a vampire clan in LIDL Wars using his Supermarket Trolley Gun.

These games, while no doubt fun for those who play them, are killing any use to which Facebook was put in terms of keeping track of what friends and family are actually up to. Is Facebook now a gamers’ emporium or is it a social networking site? Which is it?

The game status updates have introduced a kind of insane randomness to the site which last night saw women all over the world posting status updates containing only a colour, like black or pink. This massive wave of public nonsense turned out to be the colour of the pants they were wearing. But I had to ask. To the uninitiated it looked like people’s accounts had been hacked en masse. I’m all for silly every once in a while. But it has to be grounded in some basic shared understanding for the jokes to work. One person posted a colour without knowing what was going on, just to join in!

Last night I updated the Facebook app on my iPhone and discovered that the option to sync contacts with Facebook friends doesn’t just add Facebook profile links into the address book for people you already know on the site as well, it also adds in Facebook info for the people in your contacts who haven’t told you they’re on Facebook. Someone in your iPhone contacts may not want you to know they’re on Facebook or vice versa. But Facebook sync doesn’t care. I actually only wanted it to match Facebook profile pics to people in my contacts but it did so much more than that (and was inaccurate, sticking a picture of a stranger alongside the contact info for one of my dearest friends). Serious privacy issues arise and Facebook attempts to defend its all-encompassing intrusion by popping up a screen on the iPhone advising you, in essence, to ‘be careful in what you do with people’s information’.

That makes it alright then. I’m sure everyone who has an iPhone is trustworthy.

I am reminded of the Emperor’s New Clothes. He was naked but he placed enormous value and took pride in the fact that others were telling him his new outfit was beautiful. A while after Facebook arrived on the scene, we had Twitter come along. Twitter, too, is valued at a ridiculous sum—and for what reason? Both social networking tools superceded previous such endeavours and will, at some point, themselves be pushed to the background by the Next Big Thing.

Sooner or later, investors are going to realise at last that pumping millions into sites with shelf-lives of four or five years is never going to bring a return on their money. They will stop taking part in the circus and that is the point at which we will see that second dotcom crash. The long overdue injection of common sense will bring down much of what we call Web 2.0. I was involved in Dobedo, a wonderful precursor to social networking sites back in 2000 and my heart bled to see it fold not because it wasn’t any good—it was brilliant, and pioneering—but because the venture capitalists reneged on their promises of long-term support and pulled the plug. The destruction and its consequence in making many people, myself included, unemployed was done in the space of a week or two as sites all over the world toppled under the exact same wave of investor panic. They’re overdue another explosion of insecurity, because the circumstances that gave rise to the first outbreak are back with us if they ever went away entirely.

As was the case with Friends Reunited, I and many others are becoming fatigued with the all-powerful, time-consuming, bloody everywhere Facebook. We’re also becoming more conscious of our digital trail, our data being passed around like pipes in crack houses. Increasingly we read stories of how employers are discovering Facebook profiles and Twitter tweets and using them to dismiss employees for criticisms made public. Sometimes employees inform on their colleagues, pointing bosses to status updates in which they’re described as greedy or stupid or fat. Or teachers find themselves dismissed from their jobs and profession for saying rash things about students. And then there are the tabloid journalists whose first port of call when fishing for dirt on any name, celebrity or otherwise, is to trawl Google for blogs and social networking profiles.

You get the picture. The promised nirvana of social networking has turned our personal data into career bombs and life-destroyers. And no matter how many supposed privacy measures you put in place, the information does seem to get out regardless. And then there are the social workers harvesting your data online, government officials, criminals, marketeers…

On Twitter this week I’ve been culling my list of who I follow, removing those people who just retweet other people’s messages or—and this one’s really annoying—use every other tweet to try to sell goods from their eBay or other online store accounts. And then there are the new agers, whose every other tweet offers up ‘light and blessings and positivity for all on this fine day’.I could handle that every once in a blue moon but one woman I noticed, she posts the exact same tweet of wretched positivity at least three times a day. Okay. Off you go. I don’t care what you think of me for doing this. I’m not scrolling through that kind of rubbish all of the time. I’m keeping those who are witty, fun, generous in spirit and actually engage with others properly, sometimes offering up useful information for sharing. Where Facebook is concerned, so many new games are popping up all the time that those of my friends who are addicted to playing them will soon be having all their status updates sadly blocked because I’m sick of doing it on a per game basis. It’s like plugging holes in a sinking ship.

Where Friends Reunited went, Facebook will surely follow and then, eventually, Twitter will go down the same hole. Nobody predicted any of these sites would materialise and, similarly, we’ve no idea what will come after. If there is another dotcom crash we will doubtless see something happen much like the last time—a more boring technology sector will rise from the ashes, with much less room for creativity and imagination because people won’t want to take risks, be they developers or investors. The Internet as a whole will become more corporate and grey, a whole lot less fun. I believe this to be inevitable.

Feel free to argue an alternative perspective in the comments below. You can even log in using your Facebook and Twitter credentials if you want…

The keen-eyed among you, especially anyone leaving comments here, will have noticed over the past fortnight that the site comments have switched from Disqus to IntenseDebate before today switching back to Disqus again. The standard default WordPress in-built comments have appeared whenever neither of the other commenting systems have been running. So. Why?

A number of other bloggers have in the past written on the merits or otherwise of installing external commenting systems, and the pluses and minuses of Disqus and IntenseDebate. I’ve concluded both have serious failings but are more or less equal these days in terms of functionality and aesthetics.  All you can do if interested is try one for a week, try the other for a week, see what feels right for your blog and makes most sense to you in how it’s set up.

Any comments people leave while you’re test-driving are synched back into your WordPress database (and your old comments are imported into both Disqus and IntenseDebate), so you shouldn’t lose or corrupt any data at all by hopping around like this. Both systems perform well in my experience when it comes to import and export and maintaining a central integrity to your core WordPress comments.

I first tried IntenseDebate a long time ago and then switched to Disqus, which I stuck with a very long time and only got annoyed with and removed when it took over a week of waiting for an answer to my support message in the forums (along with, it seems, many more people judging by all the unanswered questions I spotted) and my email to the help address. I got auto-notifications from the help email address but nobody human ever contacted me as a consequence. That’s a very poor show.

If I hadn’t been a Twitter user posting messages about my frustration that contained the hashtag #disqus, which were spotted by a Disqus employee and then the CEO, I’d have had no responses at all. Eventually the CEO told me that the 403 error people were getting when posting comments here was a fault on my server, not theirs. He was truly apologetic for nobody having said this long before, but I was still none the wiser as to how I might solve the problem and only Disqus was giving me 403 grief. So I got rid of it and reported the issue with my webhost. My webhost, helpful as ever (is poor technical support to be found from every Internet company?), eventually replied with an email the tone of which suggested I was dim, having checked things out and finding no reason for the 403 error. But now it’s gone. Trust me, the 403 error was no figment of mine or my readers’ imaginations.

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