1. The User Experience:  Tabs/buttons are hard to find, obscure and unexplained. Worse they are duplicative! We all know that the key to any online product is to minimize clicks and create an intuitive interface. Facebook features neither. So like other online players who grew too large too fast, it delivers a miserable user experience. Kloogy.

2. The Concept: What is a “friend”? People have many passions, not all their friends share all their passions. DON’T FILL OUT YOUR PROFILE! Goodness, the geniuses at Facebook actually believe you might want to talk to the folks you went to high school with. High school was not a very passionate time for me. Though for some it was; recently my partner went to her 50th high school class reunion luncheon and noted that the hostess had her Prom dress on display. I guess some folks never graduate. But the rest of us got a life a long time ago. The buckshot approach to friending, waters down the proclaimed power of Facebook. People enjoy  friends and business colleagues under the circumstances in which they engage with them – Facebook blurs that engagement and diminishes the power of social connections.

3. For Advertisers:  Allegedly 45 million people a day update their posts, so, naturally, advertisers are all over getting inside the medium. BUT even though it displays ads based on keywords from profiles and posts, the truth is that display ads deliver notoriously poorly. Such is the case for all disruptive or interruptive advertising across the board! We’ve known this since the advent of the TV clicker — why don’t advertisers get it now?

I have seen Facebook work. BUT in specific niche markets with an intense amount of work on the part of  business owners. In one case we are talking about spending the entire day five days a week over weeks and weeks to systematically manually search for “friends” who share the passion. It is a deeply personal, time consuming effort and it works because it is real. The business owner is a professional with a deep and abiding life-long passion. And it should be noted that this particular group already is highly attuned to networking offline. FB simply allows them to do it more efficiently.

And that brings me back to the overall concept of Facebook — it is not terribly original. Social networking exists easily and more powerfully without the Internet (and it could  be argued that forums, message boards, email and the woeful telephone serve as well if not better in many cases). So where is the value add? I have heard many call it  an addicting waste of time. After the novelty wore off, I find the FB experience mundane and that is not because my friends are boring people, they are bright, engaging and funny when we meet and catch up – we hear the high points of each other’s lives and participate in an extemporaneous two-way dialog. But in the drip, drip,drip of daily postings there is simply no excitement in the execution of our daily lives.