Tue 24 Jul 2007
Just thought I would chime in on Dave’s post since I had the oposite experience with Facebook. Ever since I started using it, it has been immensely useful, mostly in keeping track of friends in a spam free environment. I first checked it out in order to see the integration with Mugshot. I quickly found a friend I had in High School and started messaging her. Then someone I took a cooking class with friended me and sent me a message asking about the other classes I had taken. I’ve ended up gathering information about a dental office she works in and will be making an appointment when I get back home. From there I was friended by someone I had met in Thailand who’s family was friends with my family. We used Facebook to meetup in London before I flew off to Amsterdam last weekend. I was also able to find a Swedish friend who I had worked with at E-Trade some years ago. Not to mention I can see what my brother is up to.
For people who have a very centralized life, Facebook isn’t really that compelling but for someone like me who has good friends all over the world but am often only in a place for short periods of time it becomes the ideal tool to keep intouch and plan.
BTW - The one thing I found interesting in my travels is the progression of contact information which people ask for. First it was address to send letters, then it was phone number when cell phones became prevalent, e-mail and AOL Instant messenger were big the last few years and on this trip it’s been almost exclusively, “do you have a Facebook account?”
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July 24th, 2007 at 10:17 pm
I used to respect you but then you tried to use the expression “friended” and my confidence in you fell through the floor!!! the horror!
July 25th, 2007 at 6:51 am
August 20th, 2007 at 6:22 pm
It’s been a little while since your post, but yeah, I’ve come around to Facebook since everyone at GUADEC was all about Facebook friending too. Since then, I have got back in touch with several friends from ages ago, and am now communicating (at least in some way — even if it’s a silly pirate vs. ninja app or sending/receiving a free gift) with friends from all over the Earth: near, far, and everyone in-between.
I agree that it totally rocks for people with many distributed friends, but I think I can even see the value for those people who have all their friends in their same local network. No one is around their friends 24/7, but now groups of friends from all different networked circles can publish all sorts of things to each other whenever it’s convenient.
Of course, for those of us who seem to scatter about as if the wind carries us, Facebook is a valuable and fun utility to poke each other once in a while, send messages, and read each other’s status.
The funny thing is that I wrote it off as a stupid, pointless thing for teenagers from the beginning, when there was the whole MySpace buzz a while back. MySpace is still pretty awful in my opinion, but now I think Facebook is great.