Dear Mom,
Instead of thinking about how I could “solve the world’s problems”, I demonstrated my ability to become obsessed with a distraction by spending almost the whole weekend fiddling about on facebook.
The main reason that I started looking at this was because of the ‘bookshare’ feature, but I find that there are ‘walls’ to write on, ‘notes’ to tell people what I am thinking, ‘photograph albums’ that can be uploaded and of course an email-like message service.
At the moment, I am having difficulty deciding how I am going to use it and what proportion of my life is going to be lived in it. This is serious! :)
Have you seen it? Do you use it? What do you think?
Yours etc.
Bronwen
I am very firm with myself and only use it for Bookshare!
I have seen all the features you mention but assume they are wicked distractions from the seriousness of life, so studiously ignore them.
Also I am quite terrified of Facebook as I understand my eldest daughter and her friends hang out there, so I would hate to be “outed” as this “checking out” mom. Hence I just zip in, do a bit of booksharing, and zip out again.
I use it to keep track of people who I otherwise always forget to e-mail. A lot of my friends put their photos up, so I can see what they’re been up to right away.
I get invited to a lot of events through Facebook, so I can use it as a sort of social calendar.
Hm, what else… Oh, I’m making use of all their privacy features: about half of my “Facebook friends” are people I feel I don’t know well enough to share all my photos with, so they can’t see everything. I also have my profile set so only my friends can see the information in the first place. I think if you find me on Facebook (as a non-friend) you only see a tiny profile picture and options to message or add me, even if you’re in the same network. But I’m also enjoying peeking around in people’s profiles who do have their profiles open for their entire network to see.
Oh, and I made a graph of my friend’s mutual connections once but now that all changed again.
Hey Bronwen, since you posted at 11:08 am on a Monday, I presume you were using Facebook for (ahem) work/research purposes! As in Maxine’s case, I think my (much) younger sister-in-law thinks it derisible that I am on Facebook. However, it is a useful tool for keeping in touch with friends, as communicating through status changes and wall scribblings is much less pressure than having to reply to emails.
Well! I suppose that a tenuous link could be made between my job (a small proportion of which relates to The Network Protocols and The Commenting on Nature Protocols) and my activity on facebook could be made, but Katharine would know that my argument was forced so I will just have to admit to goofing off and promise to work in the time!
I really like the Facebook Friend Network – I wonder if I could generate one (if I ever get enough friends) using Cytoscape. I have been wanting to find something non-biological to use this program for, for a while now.
I think that it is good advice to use the privacy features. At the moment I don’t really have any secrets and not that many facebook-friends, but this wall feature is an accident waiting to happen :).
So far, I am not really sure whether or not facebook is a red herring in terms of my life. On the positive, I really like BookShare and there are a few people that I am friendly with that I think will be fun to communicate with in this way. Of course, there is already one friend whom I have been out of touch with for ages who I was able to find on facebook which was really pleasing. On the negative: a lot of the people that ‘are tricky to keep in contact with’ are also not on facebook, so I will still have to invest energy on letter-writing and phone calls anyway; and while in front of an attactive colourful screen with a handy search button the hours seem to just fly by.