Jul 112007
Facebook seems to be Silicon’s Valley’s darling du jour. I was, shall we say, highly reluctant to engage with yet another social networking system. But I figure, I need to see what all the fuss is about. I must say that the ease of adding applications to your profile is really neat.
However, I am not so eager as to start actually filling the page (or my network) in with stuff (or people). I have already turned down two requests to join a zombie army…
By the way, there’s a MySpace profile page too, over here. As you can see, I haven’t bothered making that one particularly compelling either. 🙂
23 Responses to “Facebook”
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Facebook is by far the best social networking system out right now. It’s very clean and easy to maneuver in. I am always able to find exactly what I’m looking for. Compare that to the chaos of Myspace.
I plan all my parties and events through Facebook and love its ability to “organize” my friends and acquaintances”
The apps kind of bother me though, I like graffiti (where you can draw on peoples walls ala MS paint), and flixter can be entertaining (you mark movies you want to see and review movies you have already seen) some of the other apps such as the zombie one, are a bit obnoxious. I think apps should either encourage creativity or to stir up conversation, not simply be a novelty.
Personally I like to compare MySpace to returning to the days of everyone having a Geocities (or similar) page. A time of the garish websites that forced you to listen to other people’s taste in music with obnoxious advertisements abounding. A time I was very happy to leave behind and forgotten.
Facebook does look much cleaner, but since I lack friends that use it actively, I don’t really know much of its strengths.
I suppose I’m too old to “get” the whole Facebook/MySpace trend-du-jour. My son wanted a MySpace page since we’re moving and he will be a fair distance from his friends. I agreed, but immediately regretted it after I set up his account and it was bombarded with “friend-vites” featuring young women clad in suggestive attire. Anyway – not really appropriate for a 14-year-old. There are supposedly parental controls available, but they don’t appear to be readily accessible. In fact, it seems you have to open a dialogue with some sort of customer service in order to accomplish any sort of protection.
In the end, I scuttled the MySpace plans and offered to set him up with his own website and a wp blog (self-hosted of course). THAT I can feel comfortable with. He can express himself and stay connected with his friends, etc.
I requested an add from my Cuttlecandy page; I’ll put you in my top 8.
Raph > I have already turned down two requests to join a zombie army…
Yes, and my level 10 pinkabit, 404, also needs petting and dueling, and Think Like A Turtle wants to go to Chuck E. Cheese.
Please, I know we’re all busy, but can someone get on that? 😉
I’ve become a big Facebook fan through the layout and apps and especially the feeds of everything your friends are doing and have added or updated on the site (beyond, of course, a conceptual attraction to things created and run by 23-year olds who turn down billion dollar+ purchase offers!). I remember when they added the feeds and a lot of people flipped out (short video clip), but things settled down and now they’re at the top of my list of what makes Facebook more attractive than MySpace. Passive communication and lifestreaming is the way to go. Plus with all the apps and virtual stuff flying around it looks to me like Facebook is taking US social networking more towards a Cyworldy direction, on its own terms, which is totally exciting to watch and explore.
You asked for it Raph – I added you 😉
I wish everyone used ONE social networking site, and preferably Facebook. Facebook is much more well designed, easier to use, looks better. Myspace is so slow and clunky with errors all over the place. But, half my friends use Facebook and the other half use Myspace, so I’m stuck with both.
Facebook is LinkedIn for social circles. There are a gajillion privacy settings, depending on how you want to interact with the community. If you just want to connect with old friends, you can set your account up so that you only connect with old friends. You don’t get spam, invites from fictional characters or callgirls, and you don’t have to worry about what photos people in your network have posted.
I’ve hated MySpace since the beginning. It’s a piece of crap and I’ve always been surprised at its popularity. The developers are completely incompetent, break the software more times than a tester, and their support people are less responsive than slabs of granite. Less! I only keep a MySpace profile for my music and that’s it. Facebook, unfortunately, doesn’t have a profile system for musicians. There are some music applications, but they all suck. I like having the music player UI show on the profile…
Although Facebook was primarily targeted towards college students, I’ve found it is most useful right after college. I mainly use it as a photo sharing app as well as a way to keep track of friends as we graduate and head separate ways.
Applications are a great concept, but there needs to be a way to disable them and their annoying invites from appearing if you don’t want to see particular ones. How many times do I have to say I don’t want to join the zombie army?
You didn’t join the zombie group! Pfft… zombies need friends too!
Cuppycake: I have the same problem. Facebook is MySpace done right, and yet so many people stick with MySpace simply because that is where everyone is at.
Competition is good, and having the account on either service is free. I spend way more time on Facebook than MySpace, though. I prefer not being bombarded with music that I then have to stop on each and every profile I look at. I also like the ability to login without getting an error that tells me I need to be logged in to log in. B-)
The new buzz seems to be Pownce to be the “2nd” gen facebook, Myspace etc.
Has some serious talent behind it.
I signed up for facebook to check it out after several friends far mroe in-the-know about these things said that it was going to be dominant based on it’s prowess as an extensible platform (Marc Andreesen has a great blog post about this here:
http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/analyzing_the_f.html
Anyhow, I was surprised to see (a) how many people I knew were already on it, and (b) how they came out of the woodwork to find me, sans my searching for them. After perhaps 10 days of usage, it’s already my 3rd most useful SN service after linkedin and flickr.
One trivial factoid that might skew the data: I’m a montrealer and have many friends in Toronto. Toronto has the largest population of facebook users of any city in the world, with over 700k users ( http://www.thestar.com/living/article/231008 )
My own hypothesis on this is that it’s a combination of (a) higher BBand penetration in canada than in US, (b) Facebook being relatively unknown in Europe/Asia, and (c) Toronto being fairly affluent compared to the rest of canada and certainly a bigger city than any other in Canada.
Cuppycake > I wish everyone used ONE social networking site… But, half my friends use Facebook and the other half use Myspace, so I’m stuck with both.
You all will probably really like the services discussed on the Lifestream Blog.
Pownce has been positioned more as a competitor to microblogging sites Twitter and Jaiku than to socnets like Facebook or MySpace.
I had a token Facebook account for a while, but didn’t start getting a whole lot out of it until they introduced the widget API (and more of my RL friends started joining). FB does have some good social/discussion groups like New Media, in case you don’t already have enough forums in your life.
I have to admit, though, that my biggest personal network is on LinkedIn, which always makes me feel so… corporate.
hmm, so… How do we play this game? Probably much like the Blogging Game I guess? http://mythicalblog.com/blog/2006/03/24/the-blogging-game/
I guess there’s a bunch of cheaters creating multiple accounts just to create themselves imaginary friends… hehe
Less trouble to have your imaginary friend sit right beside you. “What do you think Albert?” hmm, where is he gone again…
@Morgan
Thanks for that info on Facebook. I’ll give it a look.
Same problem we ran into with IM services. Do I use Yahoo, Microsoft, ICQ, or all of them because my friends are spread across different networks?
Looks like we need something like Trillian or Meebo for social networking sites
Whenever I try to sign up, Facebook asks me for my Yahoo password. What if I don’t use Yahoo? And even if I do, um…there’s something just a bit odd about someone asking for access to my e-mail.
Am I missing something here?
There is something similar. I remember recently finding a site that allows you to search all your social networks for people you know. I don’t remember what the site was called, but you could even search the ICQ database.
Was that a customer service joke? There’s no such inquiry. Make sure you’re going to the right website and you don’t have any malicious software on your computer. “Trust me, sir, we’re not having any problems. It’s all on your end. Why did you call our technical support line then? For confirmation of the fact that we’re not actually experiencing any problems, of course! Was that a trick question?”
No, he’s right. It asks for your GMail, AIM, Hotmail, and other passwords too. It’s so it can import address books to populate your friends. But it’s optional. 🙂
Huh, I couldn’t seem to bypass it last time I checked. They need to make that more clearly optional; they’ve lost themselves a customer!
Er wait, it’s free…and oddly not bought out yet. That’s what really fascinates me about Facebook is it’s still private.
Yeah, I saw that feature last night when I was exploring Facebook. I don’t remember ever encountering that feature when I first registered. Maybe they decided to streamline the “new user” process. There have been quite a number of changes in the recent months.
Which browser were you using?