Even my mom is now getting on my case for not being on facebook.com. Am I really missing something?
My wife got in not long ago, and what I can see from looking over her shoulder, it is nothing but an endless attack of cutespam from “friends” that you don’t really care about.
Although I can see the point in reconnecting with some long lost friends, I am afraid I will alienate even more people by constantly refusing their cute virtual prayer/hug/ice cream invitations.
My spam inbox is constantly bombarded by invitations of friends to join (and I mean actual people I know, not random spambots). Most of them I don’t really care to know too much about me. Would I be too much of a jerk if I join and reject all their invitations?
My doubts just got further compounded by this:
I don’t think I am in the mood for learning a new language.
Don’t know about other people, but I just ignore those save a tree/have a drink invitations and nobody cares at all. I mean they’re usually sent to a bunch of friends at once, so if you don’t respond I doubt it’s even noticed. You definitely don’t have to have a bunch of silly applications clogging up your page if you don’t want them.
FB also has pretty good privacy settings where you can control how much others see about you and what things you get notified for.
I found it very easy to use and I’ve connected with lots of old friends. For me it’s been worth it.
I just got onto Facebook. I am a 51-year-old married man. The only reason I did it was that my 12-year-old daughter wanted to, and I wouldn’t let her unless she would “friend” me. She didn’t balk, because she is under their age limit anyway.
Within the first two weeks I reestablished contact with people that I have wondered about for up to 30 years, such as a bass player I played with in college (turns out he has been a session player in Nashville since he got out of college).
It also allows a more frequent but low-content stream of daily patter (“Diane is about to do some gardening!”). This can appeal to a lot of people but I think largely driven by the 22-30 age group. It makes you feel more connected to people if you have a lifestyle where work and mundane things take up so much of your time, compared to when you’re in school and you see your friends every day.
I would suggest joining just to see what it’s all about. It’s free, after all. You don’t have to reject invitations, you can just ignore them. In fact, I would suggest being choosy about who you select as friends–you can configure it so that only friends can see your profile and personal information. You have to decide how much of your private life and personal information you want to expose, and to whom. That is, your friends should be people who are actually your friends. I have 21 friends, after just a couple of weeks.
You can dial it up, or dial it down, to suit your own needs.
There are “networks,” which are groups based on city, workplace, school, or region. You can create a new network but I don’t know the restrictions or how to do it. You can use network membership in your privacy settings.
There are “groups,” and you can create any kind of group you want but I don’t see a way for group membership to play into your privacy settings. You might be able to create a group for your family, limiting membership to whomever you approve, and then research if there’s a way to use this to control privacy.
You can control access by these classes of people:
People who are your friends
People who are friends of your friends
People in your networks
People in specific networks
The information you can choose to share with these classes is fairly granular.
Yes. You can assign people to “Friend Lists” and then assign permissions to things like your wall posts, photo albums and personal info based on those lists. For example, each photo album can be assigned permissions so everyone can see your Rated G photos but maybe only certain friends can see your college spring break photos.
And of course, you have final say who you accept as “friends” and whether not friends can see anything but your name and photo.
You can definitely choose to share family picture’s, notes ect. with some people and not others - You basically say certain groups can see things and others can’t.
It is important to remember to put new friends into groups though, say family, friends and colleagues; from there you can choose what to share with each group or multiple groups.
Certain things such as your profile picture I think everyone can see, but all this is made plain when you go to the page helpfully entitled “privacy”.
I recently rejoined facebook, and think the potential upsides outweigh the downsides. For example, within a week or so, I actually got back in touch with a friend working in an industry I’m trying to break into, and he’s been a good a source of information for me. But even if you just use it to keep in touch with friends and family, it can be a good tool.
As the others have mentioned, you can certainly keep separate lists of contacts and give them different levels of permissions. I recently stumbled across the following page outlining some good settings to look into in order to accomplish this: http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/02/facebook-privacy/
Should you join? That’s up to you, but I have found it a mildly pleasant way to spend either a few minutes, or an hour, depending on my mood.
I’m a married 40-something guy and I joined on 1/1 this year. Add a couple friends, and they’ll suggest you add so-and-so, or they’ll recommend to so-and-so that they send you an invitation, and pretty soon you’ll find yourself reconnected to a bunch of people from your past. I have friends I haven’t spoken to in 20 years- it’s kind of neat.
As others have said, you can ignore the daily or intra-daily comments (“Susan is watching the kids watch Sponge-Bob.” “Susan is eating lunch.” “Susan is avoiding cleaning the house.” -type stuff). I like seeing the families of people I knew as staunch bachelors decades ago, and seeing where some old flames ended up. I have a feeling within a year or so I’ll get bored with it, maybe less.
But it’s basically what you make of it. Check frequently to keep up to date with your friends, or monthly just to track down an old friend.
How about spam? I’m leery of giving them my “real” email address, but if I use a web-based throwaway one then I’ll need to keep logging into that all the time.
Why would you have to do that? If you want to create an email account for Facebook, the only thing Facebook itself will email you about is stuff that you’ll see when you log into your account anyway. You can always sign up for a gmail account and just let them pile up.
I’m not sure if Facebook spams you, honestly. I set it up with my hotmail account, which has been spammed at varying volumen levels for the past 10 years. I can tell you that I get no more than one or two spam messages per day anymore and I’ve been on Facebook for a while now. I should note that I don’t count Facebook notifications (friend invites, new messages, etc.) as spam as I technically opt in for those.
No idea, but I can tell you the invitations are not intrusive. I see a little notification in the top right of the screen that I can instantly spot as app invites. I usually let them pile up, click on one of them, and hit “ignore all” when it hits an unreasonable level.
I haven’t ever received spam from FB. You have to be careful what you click on, though, when you’re on an apps page. Example: say I go to play Pathwords solo. It’s a fun game and a mindless way to pass some time. On that page, though, are any number of ads and “links” that my supposed “friends” sent me–2 “friends” think I’m stupid or took X quiz, see how you do! That sort of thing. I ignore them all.
I tend to use FB to contact Daughter (in college), some friends, and play Scrabble. You can share as much or as little as you’d like. What’s not to like about it?
You won’t get spam because of Facebook. They won’t give out your e-mail address to third parties, and your e-mail will be shown in your profile as an image file so it can’t easily be harvested. (People can read it, but copy and paste it or click on it to send you e-mail.) If you don’t want your e-mail address to be shown at all then you can set it that way too. I’ve never had any problems with spam on the account I use for Facebook.
The only spam-like issue is notifications from Facebook itself. The default settings have Facebook send you an e-mail to notify you of stuff you may not care about at all (golly, someone else posted a comment after me about another someone else’s photo!), but if you go into “Settings” and then “Notifications” you can tell Facebook what things you want to be notified about via e-mail. I really only want to know if someone has left me a message on Facebook or wants to add me as a friend, so that’s how I have it set.
Not that I know of, but the invitations aren’t obtrusive (they’re in the upper right corner of the first screen you see when you log on) and they’re easy to dismiss. You can just click “Ignore” to get rid of one. You can also “Block this application” so you won’t get any more invitations for it, or “Ignore all invites from this friend” if you have a particular friend who goes crazy with these things.
She didn’t balk, because she is under their age limit anyway.