Facebook friendship can be our enemy

Facebook does a great job of connecting people. We know that. It has changed the idea of what socialization means to us.  There are two broad categories of people who use Facebook:

1. People who simply want to socialise and
2. People who want to use Facebook for some purpose. One prominent purpose is to promote a website to enhance the visitor rate.

The upsides of Facebook are obvious. The downsides are not so obvious but include:

1. An addictive necessity to be in the loop so as not to miss something. There is a lot of "needy" activity on the internet. Text messaging is another example. You see young people furiously texting, endlessly seeking reassurance. It is painful to see it. This sort of needy behavior can become burdensome to the participant. Eventually some decide to get out as the downside of the process outweighs the upside.
2. Privacy. There is a lot of talk about the big brother nature of Google and Facebook. They collect data on us and sell it. People are waking up to this and don't like it.
3. A manic, mindless motivation for website owners to connect up with Facebook and drag Facebook visitors to their site. I guess Facebook accept this as it gets more visitors to their site. It is a tug of war. Website owners have got to have a mile long series of buttons on every page of their site through which visitors can express their liking of the page or share it with "friends" that they have never met and don't even know. It is totally artificial and it has got out of hand.

It is time for website owners to stop being so dependent on Facebook and Twitter. It is a kind of parasitic activity. We should stand on our own feet. And it is time people met more in person, in the real world. It is more healthy that way. Facebook is feeding on our insecurity.