Like many of my generation, I have a Facebook account. I was not part of the original target market when Facebook came out a few years ago; that market was college students and the intent was to have a site that was more meaningful to those people than the chaos that is MySpace.
But Facebook opened up the site to the world and I do find it useful to track down old classmates from high school and university along with family members. Strangest thing about finding my old classmates is that the people who were with me at Sop’s Arm Central High where I was enrolled for two years all appear to have joined up whereas my university class from the Business School are scarce as anything.
It is good to catch up with people I have not seen in 20-30 years. People like Edgar Hurley, Joy Jones, Helen Combdon, Cindy Corbett, Kevin Snook and Rod Bailey. I even made a connection with a cousin I have not seen in thirty years. Seeing how their lives developed over the years, how they look now as compared to how I remember them is part of the magic of the site and why it is so popular. The nostalgia aspect of it is so strong.
Facebook is a good site for building a social network and a great meeting place and that is in essence part of its attraction.
Yet, that is about as far as I have taken Facebook. Yes, I periodically update my status and post a few pictures here and there and make some comments on my family’s or friends’s Wall. I just do not spend a lot of time on the site. I find it difficult enough to maintain my own blog and photo site though for many people Facebook function quite nicely as a sort of Blog/Flickr-type site.
But a judging the number of status updates I see posted during the day and the uploads that were made, a lot of people spend a good part of their free time on Facebook. I do not know where they find the time for all of that and still lead a life. Even I think I may be too much on line with my blog and Flickr sites but I am much better now with using my life in that respect than I was three years ago.
But for so many people, the social aspect of the site is what draws them. There is really no other place on the Internet like it.
Another thing that sort of keeps me from being on Facebook much is the preponderance of mini-applications that fill up my notification box. Seriously, I do not need to receive or send someone a Beer or an Attaboy. For a lot of people, it is like the Flair they mocked so well in Office Space. To me, they are like the chain letters of old (here receive this beer and then sent it to all of your friends) just faster and more convenient. Every week, I have to clear 6-10 of them from my in box on the site.
But I do not begrudge people who are Facebook aficionados. Before it came around, there was really no other site, other than MySpace, you could hang out and reconnect to people. If you do not a blog or photo hosting site, it works perfectly. It’s just that it is not for me to center my Internet life.
However, I do not really understand why Twitter is such a big thing. Sending SMS updates of 140 characters to a network of people who sign onto your Twitter account. It’s like the Status on Facebook on steroids.
As a business, it makes no sense unless they co-opt a portion of those 140 characters for text ads or links. As a concept, it is not much different from a RSS feed which gives you updates on what someone is adding to their website just in this case, they are just adding text to their Twitter feed.
Looking at some of the Twitter posts, what is surprising is how really banal our lives are when it is forced into pithy statements. No flourishes on making something more than it is. Eating eggs for breakfast is simply that, eating eggs not a culinary experience that allows the mind to run free making connections from these eggs with the life changing experience you had when you were 12 years old.
In a way, twits, as the Twitter messages are called, are almost voyeuristic. We are peeking in on someone’s personal life and thoughts in a running stream of consciousness. To be frank, though, when someone accepts you as friend on Facebook, that gives you all of the clearance you need to start rooting around their personal information like photos, who calls them friends, who are their friends and so on without them even knowing what you were up to.
There are no re edits on Twitter posts … once it is up, it is there for everyone to see forever (or as long as twitter is around as a business). As for me, I like the ability to back and edit things to make them better. That’s one of the features of blogging … you can also edit your work to make more sense at least grammatically or even to extend it with new information or thoughts. Much harder to maintain a narrative on a Twitter stream if your twits take a 90 degree turn because a thought just popped into your head on who makes the best hot dog out there.
In reality, the problem with twitter is the sheer volume of messages you can received after subscribing to even just a dozen popular feeds if your friends are the forever posting type of friends where they think that the most important going on in the world is what is happening right now in their own personal lives. I just do not have the time to keep up with it all.
So Facebook gets my attention some of the time though it is more like an on-off thing with me for stretches of the time. But then again, sites like Facebook and Twitter come and go routinely now as people always seek out the hottest new thing in social networking sites. Remember when Friendster was around or when MySpace was everyone’s buzzworthy site? Facebook does have a healthy mass of people to sustain it but at some point soon, its growth will start to stagnate and someone out there will come up with a better idea which everyone will talking about for a year or so and the cycle then repeats itself. Frankly, that is one treadmill that I do not want to get on for my Internet life.
Even though the following video is a parody, it is spookingly real that something like this could happen.