Why Rook Doesn’t Like Facebook

Rook has been ‘left behind’ the last few years. By Facebook.

If you don’t know what Facebook is, well, we congratulate you on a life well lived and direct you to return to the book you’ve been reading. You’re a happier person than us for your naivete no doubt.

“Rook!” our friends say “You’ll never believe what Person A wrote on my Facebook wall!”

“Oh, I don’t know about that.” Rook is likely to reply.

“They wrote that they smelled their fingers after they pooped!”

“How… compelling.”

Rook has no problem with crazy birds who smell themselves after they’ve pooped. Rook has no problem with writing about it on the internet, either. Why, when we were a younger bird, we used to write about… no, no, you’ll be getting none of that. You’d have to have known us then. It was glorious, we tell you.

You might think Rook has an issue with the useless ‘Apps’ that populate Facebook. No, no, they’re fine. Sometimes, they even do useful things, like importing shared items from another service or allow friend to see your Calendar of upcoming appointments, which is no doubt a thrilling way to have your girlfriends feel closer to you when you’re getting that cyst checked out on Thursday morning. It’ll even import your twitter feed so you can talk about how violated you feel after they do the ultrasound.

Rook prefers the vampire game, anyway. He just loves biting people while they’re at the Doctor.

Rook’s real issue with Facebook is that it produces very little usable data.

Before Facebook and it’s hairier, uglier big brother MySpace showed up on the scene, RSS was the hot buzzword. RSS was great, because RSS gave you the data from your friends Blog, or LiveJournal, or Flickr, and packaged it up in a format that you could reuse elsewhere, programatically. What this meant was I could build a customized portal with all my friends feeds right there, or more often, I could use a service like Google Reader or BlogLines to follow my friends. Didn’t matter if they were on LiveJournal, or Blogger, or Xanga, or had their own blog on their website.

RSS delivered the web at the users’s feet, or at least where it was told to be delivered.

Facebook will read RSS feeds if you want it to. Its got 4 or 5 applications (AT LEAST!) for dealing with RSS feeds. But it’s very stingy with its data. Getting most of it out requires programming chops, unless someone’s done it for you already — and good luck, because Facebook Apps have one purpose: to keep the user on Facebook.

So Rook will stay in our little RSS universe enveloped by Google Reader, and our RSS feeds, and allow the vampires to bite each other without us. Left behind, and glad to be there.

You can go back to smelling your fingers now.