On Saturday, I read this post by Danah Boyd, in which she laments having now lost control over any meaningful context for her Facebook identity. She writes:

For months, I've been ignoring most friend requests. Tonight, I gave up and accepted most of them. I have been facing the precise dilemma that I write about in my articles: what constitutes a "friend"? Where's the line?
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When Facebook became the IT girl for the tech industry, I knew that I'd one day lose it as a space where I talked to my friends from college.

On Sunday, Noah Brier chimed in with his simple observation, "Unlike what seems to be the rest of the natural world, I'm not totally sold." Noah goes on to reference Danah's post and speculate on what successful innovations in Social Networking might look like.

Then, on Monday afternoon, Rob Walker (author of the NYTimes Consumed column) posted this entry, in which he poses the question, "Has anybody started a Facebook backlash yet?" Walker writes:

A few months ago, I joined Facebook. This in itself is a bad sign, but then again I’m a journalist who covers consumer culture, and in the course of snooping around on something or other, I basically had to join.
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I would say that there may be a familiar pattern here, following Second Life and MySpace. First there’s an audience. Then the marketers (and the journalists and the trend-watchers) flood in. And then there’s a backlash. Often led by the marketers, the journalists, and the trend-watchers.

So to answer Rob Walker's question - Yes. The Facebook backlash is now underway. (And like all respectable backlashes these days, I'm sure we will see the backlash-to-the-backlash before most Facebook users have even had a chance to update their status.)

I've been struggling to find something good to say about Facebook for weeks now, as more and more friends have been joining. In my past experience (Friendster, Orkut, MySpace, etc.), the worth of the social networking site has been directly related to the number of personal friends who joined. So now that Facebook is reaching a critical mass of users, I would have expected to be all :) 's. Instead, I'm realizing that in spite of the pleasing interactive experience, clean design, efficient programming, entertaining apps, and even its popularity among my friends, I'm still asking myself, what's it for? I don't understand what the point of Facebook is.

I also read this wonderfully amusing and completely ridiculous article in The Observer about a bench - yes, just a plain old bench - on the Lower East Side that has become the coolest hang among the night-life residents of Rockstarville (don't worry, I'm going to bring this back around to Facebook):

"One night [earlier in the summer] we were sitting on that bench together and I said, ‘Yo, this is the best club in New York,’” Mr. Goias, 29, told The Observer. “You know, because you have to go to a stupid club party, like, ‘Oh, it’s Jessica’s birthday party tonight, I promised I would say hi,’ or ‘So-and-so is D.J.-ing, I told them I would swing by.’ But then it was like, sitting on this corner, we see all of the people that we would’ve seen if we went to those stupid places that we hate, and we could talk and smoke and fuck this, this is the shit right here. We were like, ‘Yo, wouldn’t it be funny if we made a flyer?"

The quotes alone are worth the price of admission. (Beat) Which, of course, is nothing. (Beat) Just go read the article. (Long Beat) Then come back.

The fact that these uber-hipsters found their anti-establishment club on a lowly little street corner (outside an American Apparel store, no less) reminded me of a point that Danah Boyd made in a paper I probably read more than a year ago. (Please leave a link in the comments, if you know which paper it is.) All of these social networks are the equivalent of The Mall. The Stoop. The Front Porch. The Corner Bar. And The Bench. What we're all looking for is a completely low-maintenance, casual, and low-key little spot where we can just chill out. Maybe meet up with some friends, whoever stops by. Tell them about what we did that day. Hear an outrageous story about so-and-so doing such-and-such. And occasionally get introduced to a friend of a friend who turns out to be pretty cool.

The reason why one of these real-world destinations works is that you and your friends are the only people who want to go there. The problem with these Social Networking Sites is that their business model relies on millions of visitors. But as soon as your have millions of visitors it becomes impossible for any individual visitor to feel a genuine ownership of their space. Each user's personal space is inevitably invaded by someone that they perceive as a stranger. In the real world the boundaries would be clear. If you don't know me, and you don't know any of my friends, then why would you expect me to say, "Hi" to you at The Mall? But, in this relatively new virtual environment, the rules are murky. As Danah Boyd has been asking, what constitutes a "friend"?

My prediction is that the virtual environments where our personal boundaries are best fortified, like email and IM, will eventually supplant these platform-specific identities. Imagine when Google finally dumps Orkut, and launches GoogleNetwork. Suddenly, every one of your Gmail contacts are now "friends." Each categorized by the labels you've already assigned to their messages. These relationships can overlap, and the content you choose to share with each of them can be easily filtered as you like. It's not The Mall, but at least it gives us a scalable, yet meaningful contextual foundation to build on.