I wasn't initially convinced, but I've taken the plunge and signed up to Facebook. It has taken over my life. I never realised quite how many people I knew, and it's great to be communicating with them all again. In particular I've suddenly got in touch with people I haven't spoken to for ages. Old schoolmates, university friends, ex work colleagues, and strange people I accidentally gave my email address to several years ago. Now I know what they're all up to - who's married, who's working in the City, and who had Marmite for breakfast. And they know all about me, or at least the little I choose to tell about myself. I have a new audience for my holiday photos, and they can share with me copious pictures of their toothy offspring. There are lots of exciting networks to join, some of them very private, others much more bubbly and sociable. It's like Friends Reunited, Bebo and MySpace combined, but without the annoying pop-up flash widgets. It's great.
Facebook is the new way to keep in touch. Everybody who's anybody is on there. Best of all is the complete lack of effort required to communicate. Email used to be such a lot of hassle - having to write separate messages to different friends and maintaining several different conversational threads. Now all I need to do is stick a single brief message on my profile wall and then everyone just reads that. It's not quite so personal, but it brings breadth instead of depth. My social circle has never been wider. Admittedly I've not actually met up with 95% of my online acquaintances recently, but that's only because I now have so many of them. And because there isn't time. Facebook is so addictive that you need never make direct contact with anyone ever again.
I know a lot of you are on Facebook, so I thought it might be a good idea to set up a Diamond Geezer Readers Network. Join up and we can chat about London and TV and music and stuff, as well as gossiping about all the regular blog commenters who don't have a Facebook profile themselves. Plus I'll get to have you all as friends, and you can enlarge your social contacts too, and that'll make us more popular. And happier. It's good to network.
| | I'm afraid I've not been convinced by Facebook. Various people have suggested, begged and pleaded with me to sign up, but I've not been tempted. I've not seen the need, to be honest. Surely it's just the latest in a long series of 2.0 communities, none of which I've felt the urge to join either. There are only so many hours in a day, and there's no point in filling even more of them snooping on other people. Why would I care that someone I barely spoke to at school is celebrating their wedding anniversary with a barbecue? Why would I want to know that three of my disparate collection of friends share a mutual acquaintance who's a trainee pensions manager in Coventry? And why would I care that any of these people just changed their profile photo, picked their nose or split up after a brief but tempestuous affair? Well, OK, maybe the latter.
And yet I can't help thinking that I might be missing out. Because several people I used to communicate with online have vanished. We used to chat regularly via IM, or on some forum, or in some chatroom somewhere, and suddenly these people aren't there any more. They've not left a forwarding address, they've just moved on to a different web service where I'm no longer connected to them. I wonder if everyone's hanging out on Facebook now, talking about me behind my back without me knowing.
It's a surprisingly divisive place, the internet. If I use the right services I can chat with the in-crowd and keep in touch with what's happening. But if I choose not to join in, or spend my time inside some different gated web community, our paths will never cross and you might as well not exist.
I'm intrigued by what might be going on inside Facebook, but I don't care enough to want to sign up. I'll stick with communicating to the world via my blog, which anyone can access and anyone can read and anyone can comment on. It may take a bit more effort to write than a Facebook note, and it definitely takes me longer to go round visiting your blogs to see what you're up to, but this site remains open to all. It's good to talk. |
