"I think we need to talk..."

Yeah, those fateful words. I'm sorry Facebook, but we need to sit down and talk about where we're going. You see, when we first met, I thought you were pretty hot. I could see potential in you, and I really thought maybe we had a long term relationship in us. You were smarter than MySpace. You "got" me, and my friends really, really liked you. A lot. I'd talk you up in conversations and I thought I had really found a soulmate.

Then the honeymoon wore off. I started to see cracks in your armor. I always enjoyed Twitter's company a lot more, even though, on the surface, she seemed much more shallow than you. "You have depth," I used to say to myself, "Twitter is the blonde, Facebook is the brunette and everyone knows you date the blonde, but you marry the brunette." But then a strange thing began happening. I started to USE Twitter. You know, actually USE it. For work. For development resources. I started noticing that all of my peers who mattered were simply Tweeting and passing their Tweets over to Facebook as status messages. Apparently everything was actually *happening* over on Twitter. I found MUCH more relevant articles and content that actually helped me in my day to day work over on Twitter through the natural process of discovery and digging. I'd see a reTweet of a blog post, then I'd click on that guy/gal, and I'd discover someone new who did what I did and wrote a lot about it, then I'd follow them, and my knowledge universe would grow. I found myself poring over articles on Symmetrical versus Asymmetrical social networks and going, "holy shit, they're right! Facebook DOES suck!"

Then I started taking a close look at you, Facebook. I started to ask myself hard questions like, "what do I actually DO here?" and "Am I actually *building* relationships?" and I realized, I don't actually BUILD anything on Facebook. I just perform a sort of "friendship maintenance" with you. I'm not discovering anything with you. I'm not tapping into any sort of zeitgeist with you. I only know what my little bubble is talking about, and if I don't have a decent bubble, then I don't know anything that's going on. There are no "trends" on Facebook. There's just a bunch of useless crap cleverly disguised as half-baked quizes that can tell me what 80s cartoon character I am, and what a person who I really don't care about is doing right now. 

So I look at you differently now. I see that YOU'RE the shallow one. YOU'RE the one who offers me nothing in terms of personal or professional growth. I see how my good friend Twitter, who's been there the whole time nudging me along and exposing me to all that's new and good for my personal and professional life is REALLY my true love. 

And I don't have to use a browser to visit her. That's the beauty of her. I use Tweetdeck and Twhirl, and a host of other useful, UNOBTRUSIVE Adobe AIR applications to make my twitter use as carefree and easy as using my phone, which I also use to great effect. In short, you're hard and force me to use a clunky browser interface that just SCREAMS "2001" and Twitter has left you in the dust by using 2009 technology, making my Twitter experiences richer and deeper and much more meaningful.

And don't even get me started on useful applications. Ugomo.com and a host of other twitter based applications make "Guess which Top Gun Character You Are" like comparing MEGA BLOCKS to Legos. I mean, come on, everyone knows Legos stomp MEGA BLOCKS in the dust. Your applications are a waste of time. They're silly, they do nothing to enrich my life, and worst of all, they're transparently marketing wonkness. Everyone I know avoids them like the plague because they know all you're doing is harvesting personal information for later douchey use. They know you're just going to offer them an Orange MacBook, or a Free Cannondale with some lame ass obtrusive old-school banner ad.

Face it Facebook. You're stuck in a rut and it's obvious that the facade of "Next Great Thing" was simply that, a facade, made out of so much painted styrofoam.

I'm afraid it's time we called it a day and parted company. If you need me, I'll be over on Twitter. You can follow me... I'm just not sure I'll follow you back.