Facebook has failed us

I would argue that Facebook has not failed us in the way this article asserts: namely with the poor quality of it's peripheral tools, but instead the failure is simply one of feature bloat. Really, I use Facebook to keep up with what my friends are doing in the REAL world. Facebook is making the mistake of adding features that don't help make that easier, and in fact in a lot of cases make it harder and downright annoying.

I'm in the exact same boat as the author - I don't actively use Facebook for any of my online activity, but I depend upon the Facebook apps and so on (like the Flickr importer I wrote at <a href="http://www.feedmyface.net/" rel="nofollow">http://www.feedmyface.net/</a>) so that my less tech-savvy friends who only use Facebook are kept informed of what I'm up to

Increasingly I wish my friends would move to a more open service like Friendfeed that is good about playing nice with others and exporting data feeds to the outside world.<p>Unfortunately, Facebook is the local maxima that most of my friends are stuck at. And I neither see that changing, nor Facebook becoming more open any time soon.

this is a good example of trying to do too many things at once. You continue improving your core while SLOWLY branching out and adding more features. Facebook has rushed and wound up with a bunch of half-assed implementation. Trying to be everything to everyone won't work.

This is ridiculous. For the vast majority of users Facebook has been a resounding success. It may 'fail' some people but there is a reason why it has tens of millions of active users. You can't please all the people all the time and nor should you try.