It seems to me that Facebook has a whole bunch of the “overlay” that keeps most social communication “surfacey”.   In other words, there’s a whole lot of “conversation piece” stuff and entertainment games (like Trivia quizzes),  but very little emphasis on the more conversations that get right to it (those things that the good blogs are made of,  which put out there the things that we are thinking most deeply about. 

I’ve noticed a big downturn in comments on my blog,  and elsewhere, on other blogs.  The new “Social Networking” , “Facebook” era seems to be bringing back the surface stuff to online communication,  while not quite making much of an effort to allow users to let their “Facebook page” really show who they are.  Right now,  my Facebook profile is dominated by the short Status updates of everyone on my friends list.  Which brings me to the problem with “friends”.  A lot of those “friends” are not really friends.  I am not friends with everyone that my real friends know (Facebook seems to use this “maybe” data quite a bit.  Sometimes they hit ,  most of the time they miss. 

Maybe they need another level of “friend”…..or maybe there needs to be an additional filter for what updates appear on my front page list.  The blog integration is particularly confusing.  I just saw an update from another blog (that is a blogger blog, and so perhaps that is why that blog post appears on my list and NOT my own blog post,  which at one time had been appearing on my front page).