Facebook seriously sucks. I don't really understand how it got as big as it supposedly is. I can't connect with the person sitting directly in front of me because Facebook only lets me search for people who have registered in the same company, or college. WTF!

Honestly I really want nothing to do with Facebook. In Japan there is a service called Mixi. It's arguably 2 or 3 times the size of Facebook at least in terms of market penetration. Where as MySpace seems to be mostly high school students and Facebook mostly college students, Mixi covers the entire population in Japan. And, there is are no restrictions on who you can connect with. Meet someone at Starbucks and ask them if they are on Mixi then connect if you want. No need to be in the same school or company.

Mixi does some things which would seem to work against it. It's 100% closed from the rest of the net. You must log in to see any of it so it's not searchable by any of the search engines (Yahoo, Google, etc...)

One interesting feature of Mixi is called "footprints". It basically shows a list of the last 50 or so people that looked at your page. I think it sparks conversation. It feels good to know one of your friends was checking out your blog even if they didn't leave a comment.

Anyway, in Japan, Mixi is almost a part of life for most people it seems. So, the only real reason I'm on Facebook is because a couple of Japanese friends, who I assume are under the mistaken impression that Facebook is like Mixi in the states, are trying to reproduce their Mixi activities on Facebook. As such they end up trying to direct all correspondence through Facebook as they would have with Mixi in Japan.

Oh well. I hope someone comes and replaces Facebook with a service that doesn't suck.