FaceBook Review
Long have I been a hater of social networking sites. The idea of sharing personal information with the world is completely unappealing. Posting every single detail of ones life, like the need to defecate, or which restaurant is currently being eaten at, is incredibly strange and distasteful to me.
First of all, I don’t really want to know most of that stuff about other people. Second, I am much more interested in living my life then writing about it or reading about someone else living theirs (this is a very similar problem I have with games like The Sims.) And probably most important, I am an intensely private person, sharing is not something I do naturally.
So when my husband joined FaceBook (FB), I laughed and scoffed. He just shook his head and after quite a few failed attempts at making me see that FB is quite agreeable, gave up.
Then my mother joined. There is nothing quite as motivating as having my technologically challenge parent venture into geek territory before me. But even though I had to suffer through some personal shame at being out-geeked by Mom, I managed to hold out.
The final push down the stairs of social networking caught me completely off guard, which is probably why it worked so darn well. See, my husband purchased a fancy new iPhone (the 3Gs) and since he had just joined FB he also downloaded the app onto his speedy phone.
At first I just marveled at the little cute little app (while mocking the source). It didn’t take long for me to figure out that I knew most of the people he had friended. Checking FB and seeing how people were doing turned out to be far more entertaining then I expected. The slippery slope should be obvious at this point. Eventually my husband banned me from using his FB app (aka monopolizing his phone) and so I had to get my own.
While I have caved in and joined FB, I am still firmly in the “this is weird” camp. Catching up with people I never expected to talk with again is supremely surreal. It seems like my entire history has been contracted into a webpage; the world is shrinking before my eyes.
My friends list has finally settled in at a little over two hundred friends, which is perfectly fine with me. No more for me, I can hardly keep track of the ones I have. Makes me really question those people need to have the most possible friends, what is the point?
The month long I have been a part of FB has shown some pretty clear trends. It seems that my friends fall into a few categories: The constant minutia updater, the mini gamer, the quoter, the absentee friend, the advertiser, and the mom. Maybe I should just form them into groups and make it official. =D
Really, it’s not as bad as I thought. There is quite a bit of choice involved. Sharing is never necessary. While I did spend a fair bit of time on FB when I first signed up, I simply don’t have that much time to waste on it. I update once or twice a week, and then mostly from my iPhone when I’m out and about.
I’m still very firmly of the opinion that no on wants to know the minutia of my life, and since I not interested in sharing that much information, it all works out.
Ultimately I have concluded that FB does not change my life in any real way, it just lets me keep in tenuous contact with people I otherwise wouldn’t have been able to stay connected with. And that’s how I use it, as a long distance friend/acquaintance manager.
Rating
Last Thoughts:
One of the big things about FB is that it’s just riddled with games, mostly little mini games. No I don’t play any of them (expect Farkle), mainly because I don’t have the time. I already played Mafia Wars way back in the day when it was cool. Turns out I can only handle one daily maintenance game, and currently mine is WoW.
Tags: creepy, friends, online, vitual-life, Web
August 24th, 2009 at 6:56 pm
I have a fair number of on-line only friends.. perhaps less now that I’m old. I put in a firm rule that in order to be my facebook friend I have to have said at least a full sentence to you by voice before I can add you to my facebook friends. You’d be surprised how vague that line can be sometimes.
I slid somewhat reluctantly into the mini-games, at first viewing facebook as an extension of twitter which was an extension of my website. Hits went up quite a bit at first but have tapered off once more. I’ve now twisted things around so that people can log in to my site using their facebook account as their login. We’ll see how that goes.
Of the minigames out there, I’d say the best for a busy player is the D&D game. It is built on a ‘fire and forget’ premise so you set your PC on an adventure and then check back the next day to see how he did on the adventure, what loot you got, equipe the coolest of the new stuff and then fire him off on his next adventure.
August 28th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
I’ve seen your D&D updates. Seems like its quite entertaining. It just seems to me that I played all these games before, and Im trying really hard not to get sucked into them. =D
The friends thing is so strange. Frankly I’m surprised by how many I know. But it will never become a substitute for real interaction. Someone recently likened the whole FB thing to a online cocktail party. Apt description I think. =)