Back when Facebook was for college students only (in, say, 2005-7), it was a superior alternative to MySpace: elegant design, no annoying emo songs playing when you clicked on somebody's page, simple means of finding out which of your friends shared your interests (ie, I could click on one of my favorite books and find out who else listed that as their favorite book), and more importantly a solid site design that didn't crash whenever you clicked on something. When the creators of Facebook realized it had money-making potential they weren't even close to realizing, they expanded it to include everybody, overhauled the website and made it buggy and crash-prone, installed a new chat program that failed to transmit about 20% of chats due to technical flaws, and recreated personal pages, groups, and favorite things lists to make them more usable for marketers and frustrating for consumers. Then add the whole privacy brouhaha and you have today's Facebook.
Yes, I am an unapologetic Google partisan. There are two reasons for this. The first is that Facebook provides a service (so-called "social networking") I ultimately consider a frivolous pursuit, while Google provides services I consider more relevant (email, and although I use them infrequently, analytics, calendar, and Docs). The second reason is more important: in terms of usefulness, intuitiveness, quality of design, reliability, and just generally working the way it's supposed to, every Google product I have tried has been far superior to every Facebook product I have tried. Google seems to proceed like a group of clever, nerdy engineers while Facebook proceeds like an opportunistic bunch of hacks who are completely unaware that right now, people's posts on my wall keep appearing and disappearing at really freaky rate, notifications continue to pop up after I've dismissed them, and each picture in a photo album takes 10 seconds to load.
