After holding out from joining yet another social network, I finally signed up on Facebook, and was amazed at the automation Facebook does to connect people. It does a pretty scary good job at matching me to people I actually know in real life.
I’ve read a lot about Facebook on various web industry sites, especially about developers writing applications, but had no interest in joining. My brother Jack uses Facebook daily to connect with people, which I witnessed when he would log on everytime he came over.
Before my 10 year reunion, I signed up on MySpace to reconnect with classmates, and was horrified at how bad the web design was. It was hard to use, too many advertisements flashing at me constantly, and the messaging system left much to be desired. I’m thankful they’ve reworked their interface, but I still felt bombarded by advertisements—thankfully less of the fleshy type.
So far, I’ve been quite impressed with Facebook’s functionality and ease of use. I think after the initial set up, I won’t be using it as frequently. I would like to continue using our blog to document our lives, but I can see using Facebook on keeping tabs with friends while we are learning parenthood. I don’t have the time to maintain Facebook like others have, but I enjoy learning about people, strangers and close friends, by what they share on their profiles.
And now, I’ve got Jennilyn signed up just to see how many friends she can accumulate in a few days…
5 replies on “Putting My Face in Facebook”
Facebook is okay but I don’t really get all the games. People have invited me to play scrabble or be a superhero and I don’t even know what else. I don’t really care for all that, I just want to see what people are up to. So I like myspace a bit better purely for the spy factor (I can see people’s pages and spy on them without committing to being their friend). Anyways, I’ll look for you on facebook:)
I would think Facebook would be better for spying on what people are up to, from the news feed to the wall. The one thing that always confounded me about MySpace was the comment system, where I would have to bounce back and forth between two profiles in order to get a coherent conversation.
Facebook does protect privacy better by requiring an account in order to view people’s profiles, or being their friends. I think it’s safer although it does remove the voyeur aspect.
Facebook is a more “mature” website than myspace.
The only thing I have a problem w/ facebook is the chatting system….they really need to upgrade that!:P
Heh… the “automation” you think belongs to Facebook was mainly me using the Suggest Friends functionality and picking people from my friends list who I knew you know. I didn’t roll out the same welcome mat for Jennilyn, but I’m sure people will eventually find her.
The Wall-to-Wall feature is very helpful in facebook to follow conversations created by writing comments on each other’s wall. It sure beats flipping back and forth between MySpace profiles.
Anyway, welcome to facebook. See you on there.
Actually, Facebook offers some pretty good privacy settings. They’re a little difficult to find, and kind of tedious to set up, but once in place, they do a great job of filtering your info for broad groups, small groups, or individual levels.