Facebook “unbundled”

Around two years ago, I deleted all my social media apps and just visit through their websites. I stopped posting or otherwise engaging with any of them. This also changed my visiting behavior. I settled for once per week for Facebook and Instagram and just use Twitter and LinkedIn when I want to look up something. Typically that once per week is on Friday.

Because of my relative low frequency of my visiting, it’s easy to recognize changes. Back in January, Facebook announced it would prioritize personal moments over public content. Today, when I visit my timeline indeed only consists mostly of personal moments – photos, personal statements and memes. The click-bait articles are gone and the amount of silly personal tests has gone down dramatically as well. The quality of the feed has gone up significantly. It almost looks like Instagram now. Instagram cross-posts are now also first-rate citizen’s on Facebook where they used to be buried like the Twitter cross-posts from the past.

It hasn’t changed my behavior and I don’t think I’ll become “active” again on Facebook, but certainly has a place right now and that’s good.

Twitter used to be awesome, but today I’ve really no clue what to do with it. The signal-to-noise ratio is very low. I really wanted to like it, but gave up on it because of that. Somehow Twitter never scaled very well. The bigger it became, the less interesting it was.

Snapchat is for “kids”. It’s the only reason I have it and all people I know who use it, use it for that reason – to communicate with their “kids”. I’ve never received a snap from an “adult”. It’s also the only social media app I have installed since Snap doesn’t have a web interface. I think it also falls into the chat category.

I do wonder what’s next for social networks. It looks like that Instagram is the place with all the action right now. Chat has taken over for personal sharing. It’s also the most diversified area right now. I routinely use 4 to 5 different chat apps on a given day.

It almost looks like we “unbundled” Facebook by accident.