Facebook Is Breaking Up; Let's Break Up With It

When it opened to the public, Facebook seemed like it really could be the ultimate social network. "But then it kept growing," complains Ashley Feinberg at Gizmodo. As it stapled on features—most ill-conceived—"Facebook eventually grew too big for its own, and more importantly our, good." And Mark Zuckerberg knows it. In a New York Times interview this week, he told Farhad Manjoo that the company is "unbundling the big blue app," spinning various features off into dedicated mobile apps.

Facebook's becoming "a bizarre approximation of the niche social apps it so desperately wants to emulate," Feinberg writes. Except that it can't go micro, because "your friend list is just as bloated as ever. … You're still sharing with the same weirdos you've picked up over the years." So if Facebook is forcing you to download new apps anyway, why not switch to independent ones without the baggage? Feinberg has a whole list of suggested swaps, like GroupMe for messages and Path for family sharing. You can piece together "a brave new social world, filled with people you actually like." Click for her full column. (More Facebook stories.)