Facebook's ‘Too Crowded'

Should we take everything Michael Arrington says to heart?  The TechCrunch founder is striving for relevance and sometimes isn't the impartial judge journalists should be. So when he claims that nobody's going to Facebook anymore because it's too crowded, he names a few other fledgling social networks to join instead. Two that he names, Path and Just.Me, he's a notable investor and not just a journalist writing about social networks.

So, no, most of us aren’t going to spend the time removing friends on Facebook. Instead many of us are using new social networks, like Path (we’re an investor) and the upcoming Just.Me (we’re also investors, guess how much we like this space) to start fresh. Facebook is for thousands of people you don’t know. The start fresh new services can be finely crafted from the start to include only your actual friends. And they’re made for mobile. Update: Check out Ourspot as well.

Arrington says that unfriending takes "Too Long" (his capitals) and it's easier to start from scratch than to fix Facebook. And he equates other social networks as elegant cafes where he and his Gen X friends can sip $8 lattes, rather than a rock concert full of 18-year-old rabble.

That's a bit extreme -- unless you own a chunk of social networks and are not-so-subtly urging readers to join the fledgling networks. An easy way to make Facebook smaller is to create a different private account and move friends there. You can also unfriend people you don't know, which is probably the smart thing to do anyway.

Unfortunately people read Arrington to get the scoop on startups and may not understand that he's now writing advertisements rather than real journalism.

Contact Us