I recently joined Facebook and I am amazed about how much activity I am getting. I live 2,000 miles from where I grew up and I am getting requests daily from people wanting to be “Friends”. I haven’t seem most of them in over 20 years and I never thought that many of them even liked me.
Tell me like I am a retard learning to tie a shoe (which may have some truth to it). I have never understood social networking sites at all. BTW, I work in the computer industry so I feel like I could hack the whole site a lot faster than figure out what it is all about on my own.
The point is either 1) To be slightly connected to old friends or acquaintances, in case you want to ever have some friends to fall back on for socialization or 2) entertainment.
There are a ton of games and groups to join and wile away the minutes (or hours). All the while, your friends are seeing what you’re doing (you can change what people see of your activity) and hopefully your friends will be leaving you fun comments. Which you’ll reply to in kind.
If a friend of yours takes some “personality” test, they will have their own reaction towards it and their other friends can weigh in on it. You can see their friends’ comments and can reply to those comments.
I’ve been in several discussions with friends of friends over our mutual friends’ “status” or test result and such.
Hope that helps a bit. If you need or want anything more specific, let me know.
Really, just sit and watch. Add anyone as a friend that you would be sort of interested in hearing from, and watch your feed go by every day to see what they’re up to. Jump in and make a comment every so often. Post your own status every so often.
DON’T be like a lot of other FB newbies who come in, take every single test, join every single group and play every single game so that you are constantly spewing huge bullshit, meaningless “Which color Fruit Loop are you?” posts all over your friends feeds.
DON’T start sending beers or mixed drinks or invites or sheep or anything to all your friends. They will just ignore them.
DON’T click anyone’s name after you’ve done a game or a quiz, so that they get an invite or a notification - unless you think your friend will really enjoy it. Just skip all that crap after you’ve played a game or done a quiz and tell the app to give you your damn answers already.
You can noodle around all over FB, just by yourself. No need to look like a fumbling annoying idiot to all of your friends by making everything public.
This. I think a lot of people don’t realize that there is a “skip” or “continue” button after each quiz when they ask you to invite your friends. You don’t have to and frankly shouldn’t unless you know they’d like the quiz. You also don’t have to publish everythnig you do.
That does help but I think it must be a personality thing with me. Almost all of the people that contact me are females with only a few exceptions. Some of them were the hottest cheerleaders at my high school which leads me to believe that I interpreted things horribly wrong at the time. They could be running a duece or a duece and a half now for all I know. I write to most of them. Do females just get much friendlier as they get older?
I love that they’ve instituted the skip button and the don’t publish button. I can still have the fun I want without annoying other people. Unless I know for sure they’d really like it – sort of like forwarding a joke. 99% of the time, I delete jokes sent to me. Every now and then I’ll see one that my mom would like or one of my friends, and I just send to them. It’s the same on Facebook.
For me the great thing about Facebook is keeping up with the people who really are my friends. We are a military family, though we are normally stationed at home where our family, friends, church, etc is. But we do have to travel sometimes, so we can keep in touch so much easier now. My DH is currently overseas, and he still knows what is going on in his friends’ lives, sees pictures of people/activities when he wants, and stuff like that.
I am the type (and DH more so) to try to keep my friend count down. This sounds bad, but we try to limit it to people we actually care what happens to them. None of this “Oh wow we met one time and now we’ll be friends forever on Facebook!” Sure we have some old high school buddies on there that we haven’t seen in 15 years, but they are ones that we really were friends with and it’s nice to see where they are now. It’s mostly our close friends and family, and we enjoy it. (Although I’ll admit I’m a Farm Town Addict right now!)
In my experience, no one over 30 is really looking to hook up over FB. When you join and put in your school/hometown info, Facebook alerts people with similar school stats that you might be someone they know. If you have friends in common, you’ll be suggested even more heavily.
People see your name/face and think “Oh, I wonder what he’s been up to since high school!” and just add you. It’s no skin off their nose. Some people just want to befriend everyone they went to school with. A lot of times I’ll get a suggestion and see who else friended the person. I know for a fact they weren’t very good friends at all with those people in high school…but it seems like I see the same people over and over befriending everyone from our class.
There’s also people who have no idea who you are, or maybe just a vague idea, but they see your name up in the suggestions and click away. Some people just click on anything. How do you think viruses and malware spread?
I’ve found old friends from high school and my last job. I’m trying to avoid getting sucked into the games, but I enjoy Mafia Wars and Pet Society and Deadline. There’s an SDMB team over there…most folks on Facebook have posted what their user name is here, so you can friend who you like and admire. Don’t feel bad about ignoring friend invites from people you don’t know. Some people seem to have a need to rack up thousands of friends.
Girls from high school are not looking for romance, they’re just curious about what everyone has been up to. And they don’t have to worry about social status or anything, so they can afford to let natural curiosity and friendliness out. I think maybe guys are not like this. I always wonder what happens to people. I would be quite happy to see people from grade school, just to see where they are now. They don’t have to have been my best friends or anything, but I have friendly feelings towards the world in general and I’m curious.
One of the first people to friend me when I joined FB was the popular cheerleader when we were in HS. We went to the same church and had a lot of mutual friends, but were never more than vaguely friendly acquaintances. We conversed more over FB than we ever did in HS, but she’s quite a pleasant person and it’s fun to see what she’s up to, and she likes seeing what I’m up to. Also she has posted a zillion pictures from years ago, which is highly entertaining. That’s all there is to it.
I had forgotten I had signed up there, until I got a friend request from one of my sisters. I accepted, then got a page with most of my nieces and nephews on it. I added them as friends. But I don’t get any daily bulletins or anything.
You’ll get updates if you actually sign into Facebook. You’ll only get e-mail notifications for a few things.
That all assumes that your Facebook Friends actually do things on their profiles. If they don’t do anything (like you), your homepage won’t show you any updates and vice versa.
Having less then ten people as FB Friends makes the whole thing a lot less fun unless they all really take part in commenting on stuff. You do need a decent amount of people as friends, that actually do stuff (play games and such) for FB to be entertaining.
I’ve also found a rough age correlation in using FB. Most users I know (either on my friends list there or friends of friends or, heck, my nieces/nephews) range in age from high school to maybe late 30s. There are a lot of users older than that, mind you, but it seems harder to find classmates and such because either 1) they’re not online as much as, say, you, or 2) they just don’t “get” FB for one reason or another, like one of my SILs. Her response is “Why the hell would I want to let people I knew 25 years ago know anything about me now?”
That said, out of my high school graduating class, there are perhaps 4 of us on FB. None of us have friended each other.
What ZipperJJ has already said. I can’t understand what joy there is in competition to have 1,000’s of friends listed. And those annoying games- they become really irritating (to me). Not so much that people take them but that they advertise they participate in games that are so vapid, pointless, puerile and basically witless.
TTFN - I have to go now and see what Michael Jackson song I am.
OH god, THIS!! I have several people on my list that do this constantly and I just have them on ignore now. One is my sister-in-law who is a constant chatterbox in real life, and I swear LIVES on Facebook. I get at least 1 or 2 app or invites from her a day. Every day. Sometimes more.
You might want to go into your privacy settings and make sure you are OK with the defaults. I think that, by default, your profile is open to your friend list and everybody in your network. Even if you limit profile access to your current friend list, others can still see a thumbnail photo and basic info of your choosing.
Well, there is of course the possibility that they were all secretly in love with you in high school and are hoping to rekindle that old flame. Or, they may just have noticed your profile under the “People You May Know” thingy in the upper right hand corner of the screen, thought “Yeah, I DO know him” and clicked on it. They’re your people, I’ll leave it to you to decide which is more likely.
ZipperJJ, AFuckingMen. I don’t want to hear about virtual daquiries, or play Bejeweled Blitz, or know what Disney Princess you are. My sister takes every friggin’ quiz, often more than once, and my newsfeed is a honkin’ mess. I wish more people realized that just because you take a quiz doesn’t mean you have to publish it.
Also people, if you could maybe take “Status Update” a little less literally, that would be nice. I don’t need to know every time you move from room to room, experience a slight change in mood, or fart. I’m reminded of the old rule at Fametracker (god, I miss the good ol’ days of Fametracker), “Be Funny, or We’ll Kill You Where You Stand”. We can replace “funny” with “entertaining”, “informational”, “insightful”, hell, I’ll settle for “mildly amusing”. But seriously folks… this is your face to the world, and do you really want the world to think you have nothing more interesting to say than “Having some coffee now, might go to the grocery store later”?
And above all, stop inviting me to Pampered Chef parties in other states. In fact, stop with the Pampered Chef shit altogether, please.
I forgot about that group! I joined months ago and never bothered to post anything. Thanks for the reminder.
To the OP - Facebook’s what you make it, really. I use it to stay in touch with all my friends from back home, keep up with their lives. Many people find it easier to put up a message saying “Yay, I won a trip to Bermuda” than to send out an email to all their friends individually. I just enjoy having a chance to see pictures of my friends and their kids, and to interact with people I would probably otherwise lose touch with.
