Facebook - what is it good for?
In Facebook, Ross Gardler asks:
What features of Facebook make you come back day after day?
The interesting thing about Facebook for me is to see how far I am dragged into using it by the groundswell of public enthusiasm before the next, more compelling thing comes along and we find this closed system is no use anymore. A bit acerbic perhaps. I guess what I’m tryin to say is that I’m using Facebook in an experimental way, and one prerequisite for a useful experiment would seem to be to use it regularly.
So, what can I find in Facebook to motivate me to bother logging in?
- finding out what ex colleagues are up to. I joined Facebook while working in London and the networks of people associated with that former life are busier than the networks associated with my current life.
- discovering small snippets of things I didn’t know about colleagues/friends/acquaintances. For example, I see that Pete Johnston lists the work of Augustus Pablo among his favourite music - I’m a fan, and might now compare notes with Pete when I next see him in the pub (rather than making disparaging remarks about Sunderland FC’s lovely manager).
- former colleagues have been uploading photos of people in The George pub (Holloway, North London) as part of the activities of a Facebook group called “The George Appreciation Society” - it’s been fun remembering people I haven’t seen for years.
- discussions about Facebook…. well, this is where most of the discussion takes place
Slim pickings really…. all quite trivial, but fun (for me) nonetheless.
So far I haven’t used Facebook to do anything useful - it’s more of a distraction than anything else. Several people have talked about using Facebook as a new web-portal - the one-stop-shop interface into various other systems and information flows. I’ve already installed the embeddable Twitter application for example. But this is hardly compelling.
I would love to be able to connect this post to Ross’s question in Facebook in much the way that we are accustomed to doing in the blogosphere, but the closed nature of Facebook makes this a less than ideal arrangement. I guess if you want to join in the conversation, then you already have a Facebook account and can find Ross in Facebook and answer the question there. In the meantime, I will post the URL to this post as my answer to Ross’s question in Facebook - my blog can be freely accessed from within Facebook of course ….
(Note that I’ve deliberately not linked to people’s Facebook profile pages because they are not accessible without a Facebook account).
Technorati Tags: Augustus Pablo, Facebook, Pete Johnston, Ross Gardler
August 17th, 2007 at 9:51 am
You say… “The interesting thing about Facebook for me is to see how far I am dragged into using it by the groundswell of public enthusiasm before the next, more compelling thing comes along and we find this closed system is no use anymore.”
That pretty much sums up my own position. I’ve been coming and going from various social networking tools for years (since Orkut in 2002). They’ve been growing in popularity, but any one of the “walled gardens” still only contains a small portion of my true social network.
You hit the nail on the head with your observation that you can’t link this post to my question on facebook. What has happened is that this post has split the potential community discussion in two, thus devaluing both strands since only partial info is available to each participant.
August 17th, 2007 at 10:44 am
Ha ha! I’ll have to work on my Top 5 Augustus Pablo tracks before I bump into you next.
Yeah, completely agree with you re Fb. For work purposes, I suppose I do some cursory watching of what people are bookmarking/reading/viewing, but I prefer to follow colleagues’ activity via Twitter.
And I’ve no intention of contributing content to Fb discussion boards or “answers to My Questions” (which I uninstalled anyway because I was getting too many invitations to answer dumb questions) where (as far as I can see), in many cases, I can’t even obtain a URI just so that I can _reference_ an item, never mind an RSS feed so that I can surface that content elsewhere.
Brian’s post the other day where he had to embed screenshots just to give an idea of what he was talking about was a perfect illustration of the problem!
August 17th, 2007 at 10:45 am
Thanks for posting Ross’ question. I couldn’t even see that since I did not accept the installation of the application My Questions in Facebook. That means I also wouldn’t have seen your posting of the link to this blog post either. Good thing I subscribe to your public RSS feed.
To me Facebook is a deep well. I go back periodically to see if anyone has fallen in, but I don’t live there.
Cheers,
Randy
August 17th, 2007 at 12:58 pm
Paul and Pete…
I neglected to mention that I too am An Pablo fan.
Now, music for social networking that is well worthwhile. Discovered some really good stuff in just the last few days through http://www.last.fm. I don’t even have to identify my friends, it just tells me.
Another good music networking site is http://www.emusic.com
They both suffer from the walled garden problem but at least I don’t have to spend an age refusing silly application invites and searching out my friends to feel popular. It tracks my plays (last.fm) or purchases (emusic) and points me at other people with similar tastes.
Randy - on facebook Tony Linde asked if the need to install an application to engage with people annoyed them. There was a resounding yes - so you are not alone.
August 17th, 2007 at 3:40 pm
Thank you for all your comments - I’m reassured I’m not completely out of step with the entire world!
August 19th, 2007 at 11:32 pm
This is far more enlightening that Ross’ question on his profile, I have to say.
I’ve got a slightly different perspective on this one, in that I actually can’t be bothered to upkeep any kind of web presence for any reason, I’m guessing most of you guys are academics so you use these tools all the time, I’m guessing this kind of activity is well worth the time taken to keep it up….
I’m not an academic, but I work in IT (data modelling mostly) - I have had a website in the past, but I couldn’t be bothered to keep it up, I don’t enjoy web development and this was before decent content managment systems, I’ve had a blog as well, but again pointless. Facebook is the first thing for me that has abstracted the development of a web presence to such a high degree (or at least the first one that is easy enough for most of the population, therefore I became aware of it).
So - first thing - ease…
I think the important thing for me here is context, you meet your existing friends on facebook in EXACTLY the same context you meet them in real life, through other friends, organisations, institutions etc, it’s possibly easier to be a random “loony on the bus” than in real life, but I haven’t tried it and people seem to be quite respectful of personal space (cruddy apps notwithstanding - GUILTY!!!!).
With Ross’ music stuff he’s also talking about context, in that he likes x,y,z etc. If I liked a band then the chances are I’d be more likely to keep in touch with someone I’d met at a party if we clicked because we had similar tastes in music (I think these are very important factors for me and Ross at least, can’t speak for the rest of you). I might have met someone at a concert for this band, a lot of my oldest friends were forged probably not because of music but it was a big part of our relationship, therefore I see music as just another social context like organisations, teams and other friends.
Walls can be got around given sufficient financial incentive/having the first clue about how to do the security.
Whether facebook survives per se I don’t really care, although I do like the way it lets you interact contextually and ignore Geography, so many people I know have moved away (must be me ;)). I know, I know, I could do that through a website but this is the first time anyone has got the interface (mostly) right and hit a critical mass which includes me.