I enjoy Facebook but seldom post. My kids do post pictures often of my Granchildren. The youngest is 18 months, and lives in Denver Vs Callif. I get to see weekly pictures and viedos of him so I am able to watch the changes as they happen.
Also I use to work with Youths. And Now I get to see their kids and who they married.
Facebook seams to me a bad place to make new friends but a good place to catch up with those that you know but don’t see often.
My dad joined Facebook at age 83 to connect with any relatives and friends that he hadn’t heard from for many years. It’s much easier to find someone through Facebook than to try to find the email address of someone you haven’t communicated with for several decades.
As others have said, it is brilliant for people you are not close to but care enough for to be interested in what they are up to.
One guy I went to high school with we used to call Boo Radley. He had a very bad home situation and was pretty under nurished, and had the palest complexion of anyone I have ever seen excepting actual albinos. I think the meals at school were about the only ones he got. He was also practically illiterate. One of my teachers basically made me his mentor for one class. I kind of like hearing what he is up to, he makes fairly literate posts, and is in nursing school, and now I would call him Side Show Bob instead of Boo Radley (skinny white guy with dreadlocks) I also keep up with that teacher that made me his mentor. I really don’t have much to say to these people, and would struggle to reply if they emailed me, but I really am interested in what they are up to. The Boo Radley guy used to email me after finding me on classmates.com, and it seemed a little wierd due to his having found Jesus etc. Facebook is far less wierd.
It is also a good place to share pictures with people you are close to. There are other sites to do this, but they tend not to offer the means to comment, etc.
It can be a good place to put the odd thought “out there” without it being directed at anyone in particular…kind of like the old practice of hauling your soapbox out to the public square and holding forth.
I may have missed it mentioned somewhere above, but for every thing you can do on facebook, there’s always some way of not doing it, if that particular element doesn’t interest you. Okay, if a friend sometimes posts pictures that interest you and sometimes posts pictures that don’t interest you, you’ll have to make the conscious choice to skip past his new album of close ups of his gardenias. But if all you want to do is see what new pictures people have posted, you can filter out everything else. If you don’t want updates from people’s … whatever the current fad game is … you can have updates from that game removed.
And you can chose between browsing through everything that’s new, or have facebook filter it based on who you seem to interact with the most.
I keep the FB account because it’s the only way I keep track of what my kids are doing, since they rarely call and never write. Otherwise, it’s a total waste of time, unless you really like knowing what someone is eating for breakfast or what music he’s listening to. I’m a grouchy 64-year old, but really hope to achieve cranky status by the time I’m 70.
You might want to google reasons not to use facebook. Lifehacker had a list a while back and I’m sure there are others. It may not affect your decision, but you’re asking what use it may be and I can give you 100 reasons why you should be using a lot of things that you don’t really need.
Personally, I don’t use it and think my life is better for it. I’m in touch with the people I care about and waste 0 hours per week on the people I don’t.
I signed up for it a few years ago to see what it was about, using a phony name and an old gmail address that I had only ever used once to email my sister. It immediately started showing me pictures of people I hadn’t seen or heard from for years, mostly friends of my sister, her kids and her kids girlfriends. I had a privacy freak-out and deleted the account.
Seems to me FB is good for letting people you don’t know very well and don’t like very much get in touch with you.
That happens from time to time. I usually give them a chance to post something of interest, but by and large they start linking to rainbow and pony sites, or are obsessed with their children and I end up blocking them. One person is a distant cousin who is researching the same family lines as I am. I couldn’t take her horrifying 3rd-grade grammar, so out she went.