So what would it look like to leave Facebook? Let’s caveat this with one thing: there is not another service that enables friend-of-a-friend discovery as effectively as Facebook, such that finding one classmate or childhood friend opens the way to a panoply of others. So concede that Facebook may still be necessary as a sort of white pages.
After that, the question becomes this: what do most people use Facebook for, and what substitutes for that? Simple:
STATUS UPDATES: Twitter. DUH.
SHORT-FORM POST: Tumblr is the current favorite (NB: I did change my Tumblr URL to match this blog, so you may need to change how you get at it) but there are others out there. Posterous is one I keep getting references to – maybe I need to check that out?
NOTES: Anything like WordPress or TypePad or hell, even LiveJournal would work for this.
PHOTOS: Well, this is pretty much Flickr. I suppose if you’re willing to take a flyer on Google, you could use Picasa and Google Buzz to handle all of the above. MobileMe’s Gallery feature is not a bad notion for this either.
VIDEO: Let’s face it, this is probably always going to be YouTube, although something like Vimeo might work too.
The problem there becomes “how do you handle granular access?” Because a lot of these services do not have a lot of flexibility – Twitter lets you block EVERYTHING and then approve followers, but individual posts are tougher to handle. I haven’t explored the short-blogging services much, but it looks as if that sort of granularity is tough to do. Perhaps you wind up with one service as your public face, another as your general friend service, and maybe something separate for just your closest friends and family.
And then the problem is “how to aggregate it?” The obvious solution is “RSS” but as mentioned previously, a lot of people (like ‘er indoors for instance) aren’t wild about it. If you can have all your friends feeding into one Twitter or the other and follow all of them, or have everybody pouring into Tumblr, or using something like Threadsy – well, maybe, maybe not.
And that, ultimately, is how Facebook hangs on: central point of contact and an easy way to cover everybody at once. And for the time being, there’s still some granularity to who can access what. Until that becomes an impediment to advertisers, at which point you can expect to get Zuckerpunched again.