The Ed Techie

How to undermine Facebook

Like many people, I have a Facebook profile, but it isn't something I use much. And like many people I've become increasingly uneasy about the way our interactions are monetised and manipulated. I don't mind this to an extent - I'm willing to trade off free use of something for some adverts I ignore, for example. But it's begun to feel all rather insidious with Facebook.

Alan Levine posted that he wasn't going to dramatically quit Facebook, but his plan was to maintain a non-presence:

But quitting seems to pointless. Or impactless. So I have an evil plot. I am keeping my facebook account, but I have completely neutralized its presence. I belong to no groups, like nothing, or use anything that sucks in my information 

But I think you could take this one step further. In those fantasy books and comics, when a human needs to slay a monster, they nearly always have an epiphany where they use it's own strength against it. The same approach could be applied to the behemoth of Facebook.

What Facebook really sells to companies is meaningful data and connections. The key to this is that they are meaningful. If I 'Like; a company it matters because my friends will believe that I really endorse their products. If I install an app it's because it appeals to me. And if people who Like X tend to also Like Y then that becomes valuable data.

But what if those actions weren't meaningful? What if they were genuinely, and deliberately random? A company may get some benefit along the lines of 'all publicity is good publicity', but the real value of knowing it's something I genuinely like is removed. And this corrupts the data set, because those connections between points are no better than a random number generator.

So, if I was a real hacktivist type, I'd create a tool that searches Facebook and randomly suggests companies to Like and apps to install. Then we'd all do it, and Mark Zuckerberg would cry 'I'm melting, I'm melting.'

This is only a half-serious suggestion - the point I want to make is that in social media, it is integrity that counts - data integrity, personal integrity and behavioural integrity. Which prevents marketing firms and retailers with a problem as often they are trying to modify or coerce this integrity. But as soon as you do that, the whole approach becomes meaningless. If I retweet something because I might get a prize, then people don't value that tweet. And so the moral is, don't sell your integrity cheaply. And don't manipulate our integrity or we can use it against you.

Categorisation angst, the monoamorous and Google+

Yes, we're all playing with Google+, and I suspect blogging reactions to it, but this is not one of those posts (quick verdict: it's immediately better than Buzz/Wave, and Circles combined with Hangout could be very useful for research teams, institutions). No, what this post is about is the categorisation dilemmas that tools such as Google+ generate, and our relationship with technology.

In terms of categorisation my first dilemma was whether work colleagues count as 'friends'. I chatted to George Siemens about this and he concluded he didn't have friends, just colleagues (or colleagues who are also friends). I'm in a similar position, or at least my online self is. I do have some friends (some of whom are not imaginary), but they tend not to be the sort of people who'll be in Google+. And there are plenty of people I work with who I would also count as friends (such as George). And then there are people who I've never even met who I think of as friends (Jim Groom and Alan Levine for example). But friends is a very laden term, so do I want to recreate the Facebook definition, or reclaim it for 'special' people? Dunno.

And on this subject of this I am unsure which approach to take to adding people into Google+. When I started in Facebook I befriended anyone, but after a while I stripped this back to people I knew reasonably well. In Twitter I have a more open approach, although once I was following about 1000 people I stopped following back automatically. So do I want the wide or narrow network in Google+. Dunno yet.

Lastly, looking at Google+ brought to mind a post I did a few years ago, in which I argued that we are largely irrational in our choice of software, but often dress this up in terms of rational decision making around features. We have an emotional connection to software and tend to be loyal to one type. We are essentially monoamorous for categories of software, you're either a Facebook or Twitter person, a Blackboard or Moodle advocate, Flickr or Picassa freak, etc (you may have accounts in both, but you're loyalty will be with one or the other). As I argued then, it's like the team you support (in football or whatever) - the whole point of the attachment is to have only one (although it is acceptable to have more than one loyalty at different levels eg local team, main team, national team).

If you are launching a new software service then this monoamorous behaviour is significant - either the service needs to be better enough to lure people away or it has to be distinctive enough to constitute a different category. You can't rely on people wanting more than one service that does the same thing.

Which brings me back to Google+, sooner or later those of us who use these things intensively will have to go with one or the other. There will be cross-streaming so you can feed one from the other, but our attention and loyalty will be with one or the other. And in these kinds of businesses, it's attention that counts. 

Which leaves me with the big question - which one will win my affections? Definitely dunno.

Social media in society roundup

I'd like to do this regularly, but probably won't, a review of stories and how social media has related to them. I think it would be interesting to chart the impact social media is having on actual society (not just the techie or ed techie one). Here are a few stories over the past month that caught my attention:

Rentokil news release - in March several newspapers ran a story about there being '2,000 bugs in every train carriage'. It was based on "Research by pest controllers Rentokil". Science journalist Ben Goldacre smelt (ahem) a rat and followed it up. Ben chased them up through twitter, email and phone but couldn't get access to the email which had been sent to journalists by Rentokil's PR company. But eventually the truth emerged:

"After a bit of prodding, their PR company Brands2Life explained how these bugs were counted. No buses were studied, and no trains were studied either. ... contrary to what was said earlier, wherever it came from, these numbers did not come from measurements and counts, they are actually based on a “theoretical model”.

...Rentokil’s model for the number of bugs on trains and buses made some interesting assumptions, and you will have your own view on whether they make for a reasonable approximation to the real world.

They assumed, for example, that the railway carriage or bus was left alone, by itself, in isolation. They assumed this isolated carriage was helpfully furnished with a plentiful food supply. They assumed that the ratio of male and female bugs was perfectly optimal for breeding.

They assumed – surprisingly for anyone involved in modelling populations, surprisingly for anyone, really – that the population of bugs would be left entirely unchecked, with no external factors to control the mortality rate. They assumed that the siding or garage was controlled at a constant temperature all day and night, with no extremes, they assumed there were no trampling commuters, no cruel vaccum cleaners, no anything. In fact they assumed there was no cleaning, ever, and no passengers, ever. This was their model of insect populations on commuter vehicles.

“On the above basis” Rentokil’s PR explained to me: “it is possible that the stated numbers of cockroaches and bed bugs/fleas could live on a train carriage or bus.”"

Anyone who has read Ben Goldacre's Bad Science will be familiar (if depressed) with this kind of PR story being taken up wholesale and unquestioningly by the press. What is interesting here is that listening to Ben on Radio 4 later that week he commented how the use of blogs and twitter allowed him the space to really track these stories down. In a newspaper column it would seem pedantic and picky, and there would be a word limit, but in the social media space he received information and encouragement from his twitter network. This means that, although they'll still try it, PR companies now have a space where they will be held to account, whereas previously no-one would get to hear about their exaggerations, assumptions or lies because of a complicit agreement in the mainstream press. The make it up and don't give a damn party is over.

Nestle - this was the subject of one of those twitter storms that brew up quickly (and I have to say, even when I agree with them, they have the whiff of a pitchfork wielding mob about them). Nestle have a Facebook page, which had been ticking along nicely for a couple of years, with people discussing how they eat their Kit-Kats. Then Greenpeace encouraged people to adapt Nestle logos, to support their anti-Nestle campaign, on the use of palm oil. Cnet covers the story here. People started doing this on the Facebook page and the Nestle representative came in heavy handed demanding they remove the copyright infringing logos, etc. Then it got going on twitter and became a trending topic, generating lots of bad publicity for Nestle.

What this demonstrates is that people will use an organisation's Facebook page as a means of demonstration and protest. The best defence against this is to be a 'nice' company, but even then some people may have differences of opinion. The difficulty then is knowing how to handle them. It's not clear who the Nestle representative was, but it could have been some untrained employee who was just given the page as part of their duty and responded brusquely. Such a response is worse than no response and for organisations the Nestle furore should be one of those case studies on handling new media.

Leader's debate - on 15th April in the UK we had our first televised leaders debate as part of the general election. It is widely acknowledged that the Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg came out best in this. From a personal perspective it was the perfect twitter event TV. It wasn't particularly interesting, but the backchannel around twitter brought it to life. While the broadcast analysts were still pondering the big messages #Iagreewithnick was a trending topic, showing that the network had determined the main outcome (which the conventional broadcasters agreed upon over the ensuing few days). A tweet which got retweeted many times summed it up pithily: "What we learnt tonight: Clegg is a damn fine speaker, Cameron met a black man once and Brown agrees with Nick". In line with the first story here, it was also in online media that we saw many of the claims and anecdotes investigated over the coming few days (if you're interested, my colleague Simon Buckingham-Shum did an excellent analysis of the debate using Compendium, which was better than most of the expert analysis we saw).

What was interesting here was the way that humour was used to puncture the claims and careful gestures of the leaders in a way that serious analysis failed to do. For instance, David Cameron came equipped with a range of anecdotes aimed at demonstrating him to be a man of the people. Fridge-magnet then created a Cameron anecdote generator which got passed around on twitter.

Seeing the threat now posed by Nick Clegg, many of the right-wing newspapers turned their focus on him. The most hysterical was a piece from the Daily Mail which claimed Clegg was some form of Nazi supporter. Within a couple of hours the hashtag #nickcleggsfault was trending on twitter as people punctured the pomposity of such articles by blaming any event, from IE6, to Justin Bieber.

So while this won't be the social media election in the way the Obama one was, because the parties themselves aren't using it as effectively, it will be an election in which social media begins to challenge the dominance of traditional media as the means through which we experience it.

Facebook censorship - erm, no, probably not

I posted a couple of links on twitter yesterday, which is synched with my Facebook account. One of the links were to D'Arcy Norman's Things that are more fun than Blackboard. When it came through to Facebook and you clicked on it you got this message:

 

And then any link I posted got reported as such. On a Friday night one's thoughts turn to conspiracy theories: Was someone from Blackboard amongst my friends and had taken offense and was now reporting every link? Or more sinister, was the part MS-owned Facebook looking out for criticism about the part-owned Blackboard and censoring it? Eh? Was it?! We demand to know!

The problem is that there is no recourse or appeal here - Facebook doesn't tell you who reported it as abusive, or what to do if you disagree. I reported it through the bugs area, but on further searching it turns out it seems to be a technical problem in FB (maybe it's related to the use of a u.nu url?). This forum has people with similar problems.

So although the link still isn't working we can probably discard evil overlord theories. But it did make me appreciate that FB is sensitive to this in a way other systems aren't. If you really can't appeal again a decision then if one of your 'friends' took a dislike to you, could they get all your links taken down simply by reporting them as abusive? The closed garden approach of FB means you could get cut off from connecting - and if you're not connecting you're cyberdead.

But for now, let's just say dealing with Facebook glitches is More Fun Than Blackboard.

Real friendship

As it's coming up to Christmas, a nice post about the value of friendship. Many of you will have read William Deresiewicz's article in the Chronicle entitled Faux Friendship, which decries the loss of 'real' friendship in the social networking age. I ought to say that compared with most anti-social media pieces of journalism, it's well written and coherent. But it's still wrong, and based largely on ignorance.

We get a sense of where the article is going early on:

"The Facebook phenomenon, so sudden and forceful a distortion of social space, needs little elaboration. Having been relegated to our screens, are our friendships now anything more than a form of distraction?"

The language is telling here - Facebook is a 'distortion' of social space, not an enhancement or a complement. Friendships are 'relegated' to screens, not elaborated through them. We then get on to the key question:

"If we have 768 "friends," in what sense do we have any?"

I think the nature of relationships and friendships and the way online activity influences them is fascinating, so I'm not saying we shouldn't ask questions like this, but you know we are going to have a 'camelot' type argument any moment, which will refer back to some golden age of friendship. Sure enough, it comes:

"Classical friendship, now called romantic friendship, persisted through the 18th and 19th centuries, giving us the great friendships of Goethe and Schiller, Byron and Shelley, Emerson and Thoreau."

This is the classic argument that things now aren't as good as they were, and look, I've cherry-picked some examples from the whole of history to prove it. This is akin to why other supermarket queues always seem to progress quicker than yours - you can only be in one queue while there are many 'other queues', therefore statistically, it is likely that at least one will progress quicker than yours. Because we are egocentric we interpret this in relation to ourselves. It's the same with history, we only have the present to look at since we can only live in one time - compared with all of history there will always be better examples in the past. So when he argues:

"no one in a very long time has talked about friendship the way Montaigne and Tennyson did."

No-one talks about anything the way Montaigne and Tennyson did because they lived in a different age. But to argue that people don't have close friendships now is absurd. Kingsley Amis and Phillip Larkin certainly had that type of friendship, and to choose some more recent low-brow examples how about David Bowie and Iggy Pop, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, Ant and Dec? Now they may not be Byron and Shelley from an artistic sense, but you can't deny this is friendship as any age would understand it?

Having set up a decline in the nature of friendship, he then gets onto social media:

We haven't just stopped talking to our friends as individuals, at such moments, we have stopped thinking of them as individuals. We have turned them into an indiscriminate mass, a kind of audience or faceless public. We address ourselves not to a circle, but to a cloud.

I agree, this is something new, and is certainly a tweak to friendship. But when you broadcast like this, you do so knowing that most people will ignore it, someone might pick up on it, and maybe an exchange will happen. It hasn't really cost you anything to do. I'd also add that when you form online friendships it's with people who do more than give you an account of what they are doing. The media's simplification that twitter is about 'telling people what you had for breakfast' is missing the point.

But what really irritates me about such articles is how condescending they are, as if we're all to stupid to understand and only the author has seen the light. For example:

The absurd idea, bruited about in the media, that a MySpace profile or "25 Random Things About Me" can tell us more about someone than even a good friend might be aware of

I don't know anyone who believes this, people are quite capable of having different types and ranges of friendships. Only for journalists does it seem to be a binary choice between online and face to face. They also speak from a position of relative ignorance usually. Deresiewicz seems to have used facebook, and that's about it. It maybe that Facebook does afford slightly shallow relationships, although I suspect we'd find a wide variety. When I think of my online friends most of the ones I would classify as friends I know through blogs, but not all, twitter (which he deplores for its brevity) is perfectly capable of creating and sustaining real friendships. So when Deresiewicz argues:

"when I think about my friends, what makes them who they are, and why I love them, it is not the names of their siblings that come to mind, or their fear of spiders. It is their qualities of character. This one's emotional generosity, that one's moral seriousness, the dark humor of a third."

I think 'yes that's exactly what I think about my online friends.' When I went to Alt-C this year I met some people face to face that I have regarded as friends for some time. Let's take Alan Cann for example, we hadn't met face to face for various reasons, but it was inevitable we would. When I met Alan at ALT-C it was great, but it was also kind of irrelevant - most of our interaction will remain via blogs, twitter, or whatever else comes along. Online friendship isn't 'face to face friendship in waiting'.

One of the common tests of friendship is 'would they lend you money?' and this is sometimes used to demonstrate that online friendship isn't real (Josie Fraser has a stronger test including "In the event of a zombie apocalypse, would you throw yourself between me and the oncoming brain-ravenous hoard?"). I kind of had this question answered earlier in the year when my wife asked for sponsorship for the half marathon. Lots of people who I have never met stumped up real cash. 

I'm not sure why people are so obsessed with the term 'friends' and whether one person qualifies or not. It's all a bit school playground. Are the people I regularly exchange blog comments with or tweets with 'friends'? What about those I only occassionally interact with? I think so, but maybe we do need more terms since being online has opened up whole new niches in 'friendship' which different people occupy.

But as it's Christmas let's stick with 'friends'. Here's my test for online friends - let's call it the 'George Bailey test'. If, through no fault of your own, you got yourself in a fix like George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life, and you really needed the help of your friends to get you out of it, would the online ones help? In my case, I'd say, absolutely.

OU tops Facebook universities

Brian Kelly has a post about UK universities on Facebook. He states that the OU is the most popular university on Facebook:

"The Open University Facebook page is the top of all University pages, with 7,539 fans (with the University of Michigan way behind in second place with 5,313 fans (up from a count of 2,874 a month ago). The other most popular UK Universities are Aston University (2,976 fans), Royal Holloway (1,765), Aberystwyth University (1,655 fans), University of Central Lancashire (1,475 fans), Keele University (1,420 fans), Cardiff University (1,357 fans) and the University of Surrey (1,166 fans)."

Now we might quibble whether number of fans equals most popular, but certainly if having student use Facebook were a goal (or, even better, if it was linked to funding), then the OU would be doing well.

I think there are three possible reasons for this:

1. The size of the OU student body - we have more students, so you'd expect more Facebook fans
2. Being distance education, the use of networks such as Facebook to connect with each other is more of a motivation for OU students
3. The Facebook apps that Liam, Tony, Stuart and I developed (may seem immodest, but bear with me, there is a point beyond ego massage).

Now the first two aren't factors other universities can do much about, they are intrinsic to the nature of the OU. But, if they wanted to have a reasonable Facebook presence (a debatable goal), then is the last one relevant? Does creating University applications increase your Facebook presence?

I'm afraid we can't answer this with any solid research, but here's some thoughts. I reckon the presence of our apps has three functions:

1. They make Facebook more useful to OU students. Well, obviously, you'd hope so, but by being able to find students on your course (through Courses Profile), share stories (through My OUStory), find someone to study with (through StudyBuddy), etc, the applications take a lot of the difficulty out of using Facebook as a supplementary study tool.
2. They help create an OU community. The tools facilitate students making connections and dialogue. This provides a motivation to return, and to share with other OU students who may not be on FB. It makes the adoption of FB a viral process amongst students.
3. It shows that the OU itself endorses (although it was only a semi-legitimate project) the use of FB as a study tool and thus eases some anxieties around this.

So, my hunch is that the OU applications have contributed to the OU's popularity on Facebook, but it is difficult to quantify this (unless someone wants to give me lots of money to research it).

Second OU Facebook app - My OU Story

As you may know a while ago a small Facebook team started up at the OU, to develop some apps and just learn about how you operate in this social networking space for the benefit of students. The Facebook team is Tony with the ideas, Stuart with the user testing, Liam with the coding, me with the... erm, yeah, well it's too complicated to go in to now.

The first app was Course Profiles. This allowed OU students to declare which course they were studying, had studied and were going to study. The interesting thing about this app was the way it could be used to drive other uses, e.g. we could use it as the basis for finding a 'study buddy'.

Liam has now finished the coding on the second app, My OU Story. This allows users to declare their mood relating to their study from a prepopulated list, and to add a 'micro-blog' type comment. It then displays a Mood Graph, showing your mood across the course. It also allows you to send a message to someone e.g. 'Keep going', or my favourite 'Be more modest'. And of course, all these actions show up on your news feed, so others will see it and hopefully respond.

Liam describes some of the techie stuff, Stuart talks about how it could relate to his own learning and Tony gives a good overview.

Tony will no doubt post about the usage, with some of his nice analytics, as it gets adopted. What is interesting for me is that conceiving of applications that make sense in this social networking world may have more significant implications for not only how we develop educational technology but also on what education may look like in a post-wikipedia/Flickr/YouTube world. The differences are quite subtle, and probably obvious, but they may indicate quite fundamental changes. Here are the ones I think may be important:

• People not content - our applications are aimed at facilitating interaction with other students, not with content. This is not to say content isn't important, and given that it's Facebook one would expect a social emphasis, but the significance of the social element is increased.
• Facilitation not direction. The applications are aimed at facilitating the interaction between students, which is at their discretion, not on directing student behaviour.
• Less control - we haven't specified _how_ the applications should be used, students will adopt them and use them for their own means. These are much less formal OU applications, at the moment no course team has made their use compulsory. This much looser system may not be totally scalable, ie there may be some tools that are mandated. But this applies to education also, there may be some 'mandated' content and activities, but also more variation.
• Small informal team - the Facebook team, or T.oAD, came about by Tony having some chats with Liam and Stuart. I joined later just to grab some glory, and also to help clear some of their activity higher up in the University. The work doesn't really fit in with many of the conventional management structures, mainly because people do it in their spare time. I was asked how the project was being managed once, and I replied 'by beer', because we tend to meet weekly for a pint and talk things over. I think 'management by beer' will become more of the norm, and institutions will need to find ways of interfacing this with the more conventional structures.

Disaggregated communication

I was chatting with Tony Hirst the other day and we were reflecting on how varied our communication methods were amongst the Facebook project team (Tony, Stuart Brown, Liam Green-Hughes and me). We sometimes use Facebook itself to have a discussion, or we might have an email exchange. I can't really see any reason for why we use one instead of the other at any particular time, but these tend to be discussions along the lines of 'have you seen this?'

Then there are our blog posts and related comments. Sometimes we will respond to each other's posts in our own blogs, other times we will add a comment, but mostly this type of communication is more ambient - I know what Tony is thinking about or working on, and just as importantly, he knows that I know it, so when we meet we have a shared foundation for conversation.

And then we have twitter - we all follow each other, and so will sometimes send replies or direct messages, but as with blogging Twitter really provides a background to more focused discussion. I will know what they are working on, but also it helps maintain a social bond which is vital in an informal team such as this.

Occasionally we need synchronous interaction, and will use Flashmeeting or Skype.

Lastly, we meet up for beers and cross paths at workshops and occasional meetings.

I've put all this is a compendium mindmap, shown above. It gets more social as you move from work meetings anti-clockwise round to the beer. So, at least from the point of view of this grouping, face to face is both the least and the most socially oriented.

What Tony and I realised was that we didn't really register that we had all these methods of communication. Using them and maintaining an overall track of the dialogue is not difficult, it just feels natural. The reason this may be relevant is that in education we worry an awful lot about communication channels with students and having only one main method. Perhaps this disaggregation of communication is not as difficult to manage cognitively as we once thought and actually allows each medium/tool to be used to its best advantage. This only happens if you're comfortable with the technology though.

The Facebook lessons

(avlxyz - http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=2077892948&size=l)

So, as I said in my last post, this will be the year Facebook fades away for many of us. It won't disappear - I'll probably have a Facebook profile still, but I just won't use it much, rather like I have a LinkedIn profile that I never do anything with. So, before it goes and we become all dismissive about it, here are some of the good things the Facebook experience taught me. I am focusing here on personal lessons rather than the more general business models, or social network success factors which have been widely commented on (e.g. having an open API):

• Social networking wasn't just for teenagers - prior to about May 2007 I had a few accounts in various social networking sites, but none of them did much. I read about kids loving Bebo, MySpace etc but I could often be found spouting the view that if you were over thirty they were of academic interest only, ie we liked to research them, but not actually use them (see below). Then Facebook reached a tipping point in terms of the people I knew on it (and these were people I liked and respected), and within a couple of weeks I was using it daily, updating my status regularly and building up a network.
• The social dimension is important in a professional context - my Facebook network is consitituted from professional peers who I like. Whereas LinkedIn seems to be professional peers who are potentially good for business. So what I discovered through Facebook is that the intersection of the social and the professional is what is important in my network, not just one or the other. This doesn't mean I have to have met the people face to face, but usually through blogs we have some form of dialogue. This is of course something you know instinctively in a face to face work context - it's not just who you work with, but who you like working with that is important. But finding a means of extending this without it being intrusive has been something Facebook has given me.
• You only understand it by doing it - as many people have commented (e.g. Ewan), in order to understand web 2.0 you have to act 2.0. I think too many academics are guilty of seeing social networking, or any popular tool, as something to be researched, but not something to be experienced and used. This is both rather a snobbish attitude and also misses the point. Signing up for an account, dropping in for a couple of weeks, doing a survey and then disappearing does not gain you an understanding of how these things are really being used.
• Control of the student dialogue is over - if it was ever real in the first place. We can provide some official systems for students to use, but we can't make them use them. Through developing the OU Course Profiles app we've seen some students using Facebook as their preferred mechanism for discussion over the official VLE. They were doing this anyway without our app, so the question is whether you ignore it or support it (and what 'support' means in this context) - but controlling or denying it are not options. We have to accept this in higher education - it's a messy, disaggregated world now.
• Universities need to be more flexible organisationally - the OU Facebook app came about because Tony had a chat with Liam and Stuart and they did it in their spare time. When I got involved it was to get some buy out of their time. The problem is that the OU, like all universities, doesn't really have the right organisational units or structures to deal with this new world. We have toyed with the idea of setting up a Facebook project, which would need official recognition and funding, have deliverables, a timeframe and end point. But, if you accept my proposal in the last post that actually we need to get used to a continual stream of tools we love for a few months, then you don't want a 'Facebook project'. You don't really want a project structure at all, you want people to coalesce around a technology, play with it, then move on to something else. This is a very difficult approach to realise in a large organisation where people have to be accountable for their time.
• Fun is the killer app - a fact not only ignored, but positively treated with disdain by designers of educational software (at least in higher ed). Facebook was fun to use, your average VLE isn't.

I wonder if I'll be writing a similar post about Twitter in a year's time.

Facebook - the holiday romance

(Steve Sawyer - http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevesawyer/1443530999/)

One thing is certain for this year - it will be the year we fall out of love with Facebook. I know, I know, we only fell in love with it last year. As I've commented before, my Facebook use has dropped off considerably with the use of Twitter, and this week I've seen D'Arcy Norman announce his deFacebooking (as he put it in his status 'The ugly, it burns'), and via my Twitter stream Scott Wilson performing a kind of Facebook striptease, or deconstruction, as he removed the various apps, left groups, deleted his profile pic, etc.

Yes, Facebook will definitely fade this year. But before the real backlash begins and we mock anyone who uses it, I want to reflect on its uptake. In the next post I'll look at what it taught me, and in this one think about what this rapid adoption and then dumping means.

The first thing to say is that it isn't really because of anything Facebook has done. I think you can find logical reasons why you're divesting yourself of it - privacy, Beacon, spam/bacn, the very annoying feature of needing to install an app in order to see a message someone has sent you, etc. But really it's just that it's served its purpose and it's not as much fun anymore.

Now, a lot of people will be very smug about this, saying 'I told you so - I knew it wouldn't last and so I didn't bother.' This is to totally miss the point. We knew it wouldn't last either - Facebook was a holiday romance, not the great love of your life. And like holiday romances it was to be enjoyed while it lasted and approached with full gusto and enthusiasm - otherwise there is no point to it. One doesn't engage in a holiday romance cautiously (obviously I don't engage in them at all anymore, but we're in metaphor mode here), that's not their role. Their function is to be short-lived, intense, and perfectly encapsulated. And that's how many of us approached Facebook.

I predict that rather like holiday romances, when you get back to the humdrum of everyday life you become rather embarrassed by the degree of passion you felt. Similarly, there will be an unspoken competition this year to prove that you never really liked Facebook much anyway.

I blogged before that I think we are monoamorous with regards to type of software, rather like football teams, so you only love one social network, one VLE, etc. But maybe what the Facebook episode reveals is that while we may be monogamous within these relationships to types of software, they are shortlived and we are always getting ready to move. The modern day educational technologist needs to think of themselves as something of a Henry VIII figure - always falling in love then cruelly discarding the object of affection for the next one. But with less beheading.