I had a Facebook account, and deactivated it when they started their Beacon nonsense a few months back.  I never made much use of it because it just added yet another social network tool for me to check every day.  I reactivated that account to see if I could make use of it as I desperately try to break free of email.

Reactivating Facebook is a bit spooky.  Everything is as I left it, sort of frozen in time.  It looked neglected, but I figured I can take care of that later.  The first thing I want is an RSS feed.  I don't want to have to check every communication system and device only to find nothing is new; instead I want new stuff to find me.  Which is why I use RSS and why I want all my information in an RSS stream I can get in my reader.  A single source of information.  And I want to publish to various tools remotely from my RSS reader, so I also hope to find an XMLRPC or Atom interface.  Not on Facebook, though.  In fact, not on any social network tool I use.

OK, so the shiny progressive Facebook is not up to the technology available.  They do use RSS, to be fair here, but it's a feed consumed by a widget on a Facebook page.  Maybe I missed it, but feeds should be obvious, and plentiful.  But I could at least update my friends list.  They have this nifty feature that lets you 'find friends' in your email contacts.  You just enter your email address and password (not a bright thing to do if you still cling to the illusion of privacy) and it prowls your address book looking for other Facebook users.  I don't mind providing my email address and letting it snoop, so off it went and in a matter of seconds I discovered, of the 300+ people in my email list, exactly 20 have Facebook accounts, of whom 10 I know well enough to invite, half of those being professional contacts.  Three hundred addresses and I can communicate with 5 of them using Facebook.

In the end I only wound up feeling depressed and lonely.  The Facebook account is deactivated again.