The internet-cynical, tech-savvy thing to say is how much of a waste of time Facebook is, but I think it changes communication in the same way that every house having a telephone did. Yes, email and IM existed before Facebook, but Facebook is a different model of communication.
Facebook Vs (email + IM) = Telephone Vs (post + telegraph). Really? You think that these two jumps in technology are equivalent in the difference they have made to peoples lives? I don't use facebook but I would not be able to work without telephone and the internet.
Yes, probably so. Facebook means that you can keep up with people (who's getting married, who moved, who had children) without emailing them.
If you have 500 friends, each with a feed with 50 posts, you are talking about 25000 possible emails. Those emails would never be sent, because they are usually individually way below the importance threshold for an email.
So, by this calculation at least, it's at least a 1-2 order of magnitude reduction in the work required to maintain contact with old friends. That's valuable.
That's assuming that knowing the minutiae of the lives of people who you don't talk to frequently is important. I'd say that that's actually a huge waste of time, and distracts from actual socializing by making you feel like you're keeping up with people without actually doing so.
Due to the low activity on G+, I resorted to... doing stuff with other people in real life, such as volunteering and going to meetups.com meetups. And my real friends not near me kept in touch via e-mail and IM.
I many people that just didn't use email or IM much, but have integrated Facebook into their lives. It's their main way of maintaining communication with many people.
Facebook is a glorified vBulletin and IM client. It's a time waster that most people use to e-stalk or share meaningless information. I think the sooner we drop the mantra that it's "engrained in our lives," the sooner we move on to real innovation. Here's a typical day on Facebook: http://i.imgur.com/ub51D.jpg
I went to high school in one city, college in one 1,000 miles away. Have since worked in cities all over the world. I don't know how I would manage to keep even a tenuous grasp on all the connections I have with people in these different places without Facebook. Admittedly, these are not and never will be deep social bonds I am maintaing, but that is hardly the point. There is value in maintaining a large web of shallow social connections. Facebook helps me do this.
Moreover, whether or not Facebook has improved the life of me or anyone I care about is irrelevant to an objective evaluation of the site's value. I could make the same case for anti-malaria drugs.
I have been in a similar situation, with my College and Hometown very far away. Now, with all my friends spread out from all over the world, Facebook makes seeing these people again a fun (and fairly easy) occurrence, rather than an onerous task.
That is, the connections may be shallow while we're far away, but when locations change again, its nice to be able to re-develop those shallow connections into meaningful ones.
Stop. There is no value in maintaining shallow social connections. Work on making your actual friendships stronger instead of having 1000 acquaintances on Facebook. Your life has not been improved by Facebook beyond regular old email.
Shallow social connections have earned me two jobs and a number of deep social connections by leapfrogging off of shallow social connections.
If you think there's no value in maintaining shallow social connections, then I think you too need to put some energy into adding meaning to your social connections.
