I&#x27;m picking up your cynicism and I&#x27;ve got plenty of complaints about Facebook myself (mostly related to how it&#x27;s a closed-off system that requires you to use their service to communicate with people, unlike email where you can choose your provider&#x2F;host and still communicate with people who prefer others).<p>That said, the idea that you automatically use such services for shallow, mass communication with large numbers of fleeting friends is sort of disingenuous.  I keep an account there because like many people, it&#x27;s a fairly effective way to coordinate with friends and family without creating long email chains or massive group texts.<p>Not everyone is trying to be a social butterfly, resigning themselves to quantity over quality or neglecting sleep and hobbies.  Plenty of us have people we&#x27;d like to keep in touch with and a place to announce events (cookouts or parties we&#x27;re holding, concerts or camping trips we&#x27;re attending, etc) so our other friends and acquaintances can find out about them and join us in person.<p>I&#x27;ve currently got a closed group on there where 4 or 5 of us have been sharing our progress on some neat electronic art projects we&#x27;re working on.  It&#x27;s not something we use at the expense of hobbies and interests but rather a common tool for us to casually collaborate and share the things we&#x27;re interested in and working on.<p>So yeah, I&#x27;d love if I could use Google+ or some other service where I like the interface and features better and I&#x27;d love if that didn&#x27;t require everyone to &quot;jump ship&quot; at the same time.  A common protocol between social forums (again, like email) would go a long way toward addressing the complaints I have with them.<p>But since that&#x27;s not likely to happen, I&#x27;ll take occasionally checking my Facebook accounts for things people have shared with me over missing out on those conversations due to distance or personal time constraints.  I don&#x27;t live on Facebook but I stop by a few times a week when I feel like looking at Facebook.  Haven&#x27;t lost any sleep over it yet and I&#x27;ve developed quite a few hobbies around the communication that FB and other services foster.