Wasn’t it originally set up for college kids? The only reason I joined was I am presently about to be unemployed, so I am looking preemptively and people recommended joining so I wouldn’t lose touch with contacts after I’m let go
The good thing with Facebook for me is that if some one who don’t know my phone number or email address want to reach me for some reason, they can find me via Facebook. The other is when we’re planning to have a barbecue or something with a few friends it is a great way to invite them and organize the event. Otherwise I don’t care for it much, but as such, it is great solution for me.
Apologies for random snips of WhyNot’s post. Pretty much everything she said mirrors my experience.
There was a sudden death in the family a couple years back (which, given my family’s lack of closeness, I heard about far later than I would have liked), and after desperately searching around the web one night looking for info, I finally caved and signed up, if only to talk to my cousins to get some information. I stayed, hooked up with folk, and have been enjoying myself since.
Except that Facebook is more popular, how is liking it substantially dissimilar to liking the Dope?
It is definitely what you make it. I spend 10 minutes once or twice a day and keep in touch with out of state and out of country friends, as well as find out what they think is interesting and entertaining. Makes my world a little bigger and brighter.
Facebook is mainly successful based on its core algorithm or using real names and being very good at locating people that you know or might know. Everything else is built around that. Speaking as someone who lives far away from where they grew up, that is a very important feature to me. I would have no idea whatsoever where to find people that I haven’t heard from in 20 years if Facebook didn’t do the legwork for me. It is amazing. It is like your own personal private eye on a mass scale. I don’t always like the people it finds or want to talk to them but the option is there and it does find some people that I am interested in hearing from. The endless posts from an iPhone are just filler. I switch over to private massaging if I want to talk to anyone. It is like something from the future. Here are a ton of people you probably know. They are on our private network just like you are voluntarily so contact them and the chances are very good that they will write back. There isn’t any other technology that can do the same thing exactly.
Username + typo = pure gold
I LOVE Facebook because I haven’t seen most of my HS era friends in 15 years, and I don’t get to see my cousins as often as I’d like. I’m 33, and you’re welcomed to stay on my lawn, but not too long! 
That’s my take too. And there’s a reason why I haven’t been in touch with distant family members and old classmates: I don’t care. I’d rather spend my time and resources on IRL friends and family members. If I’m not involved enough to be informed about a family death, wedding, baby, whatever, via a more personal method, then the connection is too attenuated to be meaningful.
However, I am involved in dog/animal rescue and a lot of related information is quickly and widely disseminated through FB, so I do have an account. It alarms me that if I go to a site like Yelp, I’m greeted by my FB user name (which, incidentally, is not my real name.)
I have used Facebook to be able to connect with other like-minded people, both with/without disabilities, who are working to improve the (e)quality-of-life for those with disabilities. These people are spread out all over the world, never before could I have entered into such a world of knowledge and shared experience. And what can be learned from that collective shared knowledge and those collective experiences; being all in one place for the first time ever, is something that has lit a fire anew within me.
So it’s the connections. The connections, in all there various forms, whether it be high school classmates, long lost loves or people who believe they can live off sunlight; are what makes Facebook so attractive to so many people.
I love FB and I’m a fogey. A friend’s daugher gave birth yesterday evening and I saw a photo of the newborn within minutes of his arrival.
You had perfectly simple and accessible ways to communicate with them before Facebook, yet your interaction was limited to a Christmas card here or there. Why would you suddenly want to interact with them any more than you used to? Because Facebook makes it “easy”? It already was easy before Facebook. Now the only thing that seems significantly easier is for people to sling a lot of glurge every which way. What is the attraction in that?
What is the attraction of every Facebook Friend of a Friend of a Friend of a Friend (= ‘total stranger’) being able to keep tabs on you and your family and real friends? Why would you want to know about these total strangers and their favorite colors and their zodiac signs? More importantly, why would you have them know about you?
I agree that Facebook is a great tool for locating long-lost acquaintances and enable them to find you. But it seems to me that once you find each other–should you decide you want to keep in touch–you may as well get away from Facebook and email, phone, or see each other in person.
You can get three sheets to the wind on a Saturday night and upset most of the world with crass jokes.
I hate E-mail and phone enough that I don’t want to do that for everybody I want to talk to. In person? Yeah, I don’t have enough vacation time to do that for everyone, either. Facebook lets me pick who to exchange pictures/pleasantries/discussions with and has them all aggregated in one spot. My husband’s side of the family has a private discussion group that is used to set up family gatherings. Facebook has private messaging and live chat - why is it substandard to E-mail for purposes of ‘real’ interaction?
Not everyone likes Facebook, and that’s fine, it’s not for everyone. Personally, I joined only a few months back to get free add-ons for my Dragon Age 2 video game and ended up accidentally finding my oldest childhood friend (age 2 through high school) while checking it out. I’d lost contact with him when we went to separate colleges and none of my old friends knew where he was, either - until he opened a Facebook account.
I also use it for a lot of social group and consumer reasons - get discounts, keep up on the local animal shelter, be alerted to what political happenings are going on, etc.
chiroptera: Yelp has the option to let you log in with your Facebook ID instead of making a new account. It’s possible you okayed that a while back without thinking about it, or Yelp is using the cookies from your FB login. Me, I run my Facebook and Google+ accounts in their own browser to keep those cookies/logins separate from everything else I do on the web.
Except that email or phone doesn’t almost mimic still living in the same neighborhood as my cousins. On Facebook, a cousin can describe (or put up a picture or video ) of some funny, cute or annoying thing that happened. (The sort of thing I would naturally hear about when we lived in the same neighborhood and ran into each other three or four times a week without planning to ). And then all of us, from Boston to St Louis to Florida can participate in a single conversation. I’ll find out about weddings ,funerals and births without Facebook, but no one (in my family , anyway) is going to make a bunch of phone calls or send emails because her husband quit smoking, or his kid graduated from elementary school.
Facebook is like watching a TV show that stars all of your friends and family and acquaintances. You can watch their lives go by, only hearing about the most interesting bits.
The difference between FB and TV is that if you want you can reach out and interact with those people.
I have friends, family, and fondly-remembered childhood friends and schoolmates spread across the US and the world. It’s great being able to see what they’re up to, even if we’re not close enough to talk on the phone much or at all, much less visit each other. I love to see pictures of where they live and what they’re up to, and their pets and babies. I like to hear about what they’re doing with their lives and participate in random conversations via comments on their ‘status updates’.
Some of my facebook friends I have not seen in person since I was 8 (when we moved out of New York State). I love being in touch with them again.
FB gives me the ability to stay connected with a ton of people I care about but would otherwise have little or no contact with. Hell - I’m generally busy, work a lot especially weekends, have a boyfriend and am involved with his family and their functions, and don’t drive a car; even my closest friends who live nearby, I don’t get to see very often.
I guess if you don’t care about all those people you have known in your life, it seems pretty pointless to be in touch.
I use FB chat quite a bit (even though it’s buggy), and use the Event function to make concrete plans with my somewhat flaky friends all the time.
I don’t get the angst surrounding Facebook. I know some people like the OPer who can’t wrap their brain around its popularity. I know others who refuse to get a Facebook account, because they’re intensely private people. One friend declared she wouldn’t open an account two years ago and her stubbornness exceeds her curiosity.
Love it, hate it, obsess over it, yawn over it. They’re all valid reactions.
You and me both. While high school for me wasn’t quite the cesspit that grade school was, I would rather not remember any of it, and I certainly don’t give a crap about anyone who was there when I was.
You like posting stuff here, don’t you?
Same thing, except people on Facebook have presumably met you before.