Mmkay, so I was invited to join Facebook. I didn’t know much about it, but I went ahead and joined.
Dayum, I keep getting these l’il blue cove messengers (which I think are supposed to help us save the rainforest) and I’ve got some kind of farm I’m cultivating, plus I’m building a castle etc. and there seems to be two levels of snowball fighting going on. I know: I accepted these applications, but it was mainly in the spirit of, “I don’t know what this all means, but I’ll go along for the ride.” Some people must have a lot more time to devote than I do.
I recently got a smile from a friend, btw, and she’s someone I’d like to get to know (in a Sean Connery kinda way)…IIRC it said, “X smiled at you (and only you).” Is that important, something I should note? I get multiple messages, too, e.g. “Z sent you a poinsettia” and that’s cool, but two or three or four times? Sometimes I can tell that the person didn’t really send me the same thing four times, since some are time-stamped. Maybe the sender checks all friends or maybe the sender is drunk or…?
Anybody care to weigh in on “Facebook for Idiots”?
Facebook is a social networking tool, the origins and mechanics of which are best explained in the Wikipedia article.
I, personally, dislike the applications. It’s nice that they’ve opened up an API for third parties to develop add on tools, but I really can’t stand many of them. Facebook was originally the “cleaner” version of MySpace–everything was uniform, and still is, for the most part. Except now, people can add these add on applications to their profile that do everything from grow little gardens to have virtual kids to save the whales. I only use a few applications that have specific uses to me, because I generally prefer the clean, organized look. That, and when I get someone’s profile with 50 applications added, it slows down my computer quite a bit.
ETA: Smile is yet another add on application, which was probably derived from Facebook’s built-in “poke” function. In the beginning, poking could mean anything, which was the fun part. When someone poked you, you weren’t sure if it meant “hey, what’s up?” or “you’re hot, let’s bone.” It’s just another fun little add on that I wouldn’t look too deeply into. If I’m into someone, I like to be a little more direct, to avoid such confusion.
Facebook is a social networking tool, the origins and mechanics of which are best explained in the Wikipedia article./QUOTE]
Hmm, I’ve heard of people using Facebook for that…actually, I heard, “Don’t put anything embarrassing on your Facebook in case a potential employer sees it.”
I wondered—it will say something like, “Here is a fish I am sending to you. If you send one back, we can save the rainforest!” When you go into the app, it will say that I have saved 0sqft of rainforest. I know that advertising pays for a lot of things but umm, is this just a way of getting me to pony up some $ to save it? But I wonder what the angle is with snowball fights.
I had someone send me “flair” or something…well, I don’t want to be Mr. Anti-Social, so I was going to send something back. But I guess I haven’t done enough to justify sending it without giving them money. Are the apps just a way of getting ppl to pay to send something?
And if so, should I conclude that someone paid money to send me flair?
I have no idea. I’ve seen the Pieces of Flair application before, and when I saw it, it was free. There’s also a Bumper Sticker application that’s free, and a bunch of others. I’m not sure if Facebook allows third party developers to charge a fee to use their applications, but I wouldn’t be surprised. The only time I’ve seen a pay-for-something app on Facebook is their own Gifts application, which has a few free options. Then along came the Free Gifts third-party application, which, as it sounds, has free gifts.
Facebook looks boring. It’s just a white page and a list of friends. I go to a friend’s page, and I see a plain white page with ‘So-and-so is a fan of This Thing.’ My MySpace page has biographical information I wish to share, video clips, music, a black background that I could change to wallpaper if I wanted to, comments from friends, and so on.
And yet I keep hearing how much ‘better’ Facebook is. I’m not seeing it.
My main thing is, “What does this (allegedly) mean?”
E.g. a woman I know sent me a growing plant. The idea I guess is that you check it, daily, on Facebook and you watch it “grow.” Well, that’s a nice thought I guess. But later, as I nav’ed around, I realized that she had sent it to more people than just me. Still nice, but it’s not like she singled me out. So the appropriate attitude from me is different than what I first thought. Later, I found that a someone had sent a smile to me “(and only to me).” Translation?
I know that if we were converting temperatures, 1.8 C + 32 = F. Obviously things aren’t that simple here. But I feel clueless. I’d just like to know what people are (allegedly) saying when they do something in there.
That’s the thing–to me, Facebook is better because I don’t want to see your videos or hear your music or see your wonderfully clashing background when I load your profile. I may want to get your phone number, which is displayed uniformly across Facebook profiles. I may want to send you a message, which is uniformly labeled as “Send x a message” across Facebook profiles. I may want to peruse your interests to find a good Christmas gift for you–they’re also uniformly placed across pages.
If you link to a video on someone’s Facebook wall, it shows up as a preview, with the option to play. There are apps you can add that, if you really really feel the need to, will play music or videos for people. It’s really just as cutomizable as MySpace, with the added bonus of being able to ignore certain features if you don’t like them. I can’t choose to block your MySpace songs, but I can choose to hide your apps on Facebook.
lobotomyboy63, the best thing to do is ask them. I think the problem with Facebook apps, and many other things on the internet, really, is that people just want to have something be popular. That’s why there are so many “1,000,000 for x” groups. That’s why each app tells you to “invite all of your friends!” It’s possible, but unlikely, that someone was thinking of just you when they sent you an application invitation.
In my experience, the people that use the applications tend to send everyone or a LOT of people those little things like plants or whatever. When you add applications they often prompt you to “send this invite to all your friends” so it’s easy for people to do so. I deny all application invites because most of them annoy me. My friends and I were heavy on Bumper Stickers for awhile but with the new design of Facebook they are not on the main pages so no one looks at them or sends them anymore.
If you get an official Facebook gift from someone though, they either paid $1 for it, or if it was a free one, you can only give the gift once so that means someone singled you out or thinks you’re worth $1 for a digital cartoon picture.
I like Facebook’s cleaner layout than MySpace and the photo albums are nice. I’ve also added a few small videos from my digital camera. It’s easier to keep track of everyone on Facebook with the easy ways to see status updates and updated profiles, all that. MySpace is trying but it’s not as good, IMO.
That just disables the auto-start, though. Maybe my computer just sucks, but the loading of the actual player across multiple pages at the same time (I usually browse with several windows open) causes some serious lag.
I agree with this, as well. I wasn’t a fan of the News Feed when it first came out, but with the level of customization now, it’s actually quite nifty.
Oh, God, Myspace just offends every aesthetic bone in my body. It’s like web design going back to 1994. Animated gifs, flashing crap, people who don’t understand how backgrounds can affect readability, songs that start playing unprompted (yes, I now realize there’s a way to stop this), plus it takes forever to load. God, how I despise Myspace with every corpuscle in my body.
The clean design of Facebook is exactly why I like it. Simple, clean, quick.
pulykamell: I just double-checked my page. No animated gifs, no flashing crap, text easily read against the background… And yet it contains information.
OTOH Facebook is like:
Jack became a fan of Pop-Tarts
Jack bacame a fan of cheese
Jack is now friends with Jill Johnson
Jack is eating pie
I mean, I like google’s page because it’s clean. But if I’m interested in a person’s interests I want more than a list of ‘Jack is…’
You can send flair for free, and for every piece you send, you get one more to send or add to your own bulletin board. AFAIK, it’s totally free. There’s also a mechanism for making your own flair.
It’s just a list of data filled out on a form. Name, marital status, location, contact info… MySpace has Blurbs, General, About me, and other areas where free-form information can be entered. For example, my Facebook profile doesn’t have a field for ‘Motion picture camera choice:’ But that’s the sort of thing I want right on the front page of my profile. I want to be able to say, ‘I have an Aaton LTR super-16 camera and a Panasonic AG-DVX100A, and would like to meet people who are interested in collaborating on indie film projects. Here’s a bit about me: I was Cinematographer on this, did lighting on that, and my influences are…’ and so on.
If I’m looking for people with similar interests in my area, I want it right there on the front page. Yes, clashing backgrounds are ugly. But a person’s choice of background art is, for me, a good indication of whether I want to read what they’ve written. It’s judging a book by its cover; but if I’m interested in, say, working on a horror film I think it’s likely that such a person wouldn’t use flowers and unicorns as their wallpaper.
I can live without that though. Plain white backgrounds are easy to read. But I want there to be something there to read.
Facebook has areas for free-form information, under Profile -> Info -> Personal Information. The categories there are Activities, Interests, Favorite Music/TV shows/ Movies/ Books/ Quotations, and About Me. Plenty of room for self-expression, without all the annoying, flashy crap on Myspace that I find nearly impossible to read or deal with.
OK, so I went to a friend’s profile. Under Profile -> Info I see: Basic information, Contact information, Education & work, Groups, and Pages. The left column has Information, Friends, Friendship tea, and Photos.
Now that you mention it, I see that if I go to my own profile and Edit it, I have the option for self-expression. So it seems that my friends just don’t make use of this. But how is one to know it exists at all? In MySpace you can Browse People. In Facebook I can find people I know by entering their email addresses, search for people I know by name, find people I IM (which I don’t), or discover people I may know. But I’m not likely to click on someone’s profile unless I have reason to believe they may be interesting. And when I do (just now, as an experiment) I see that half of their profiles are blocked, and others lack the personal information. I did find one guy who had a bit about himself. Only assuming I held the same interests, how would I find him? In MySpace I can look for the keyword ‘filmmaker’. I don’t have to already know the person. And then I can constrain the search to a radius from my ZIP code. I don’t see how to do that in Facebook.
But I’m new to MySpace and Facebook. I don’t want to start a fight over them. What I’m saying is that Facebook does not appear to be useful to me, while MySpace is.
Oh, I know that. Problem is, everybody else has that stupid crap on their pages, so I’ve completely jettisoned from Myspace to Facebook. I have a simple Myspace page, as well. It still looks ugly as hell to me. And, now that I think of it, I remember another problem with me is that a good percentage of the time, I would get errors logging into Myspace. Frustrating.
The stuff you put in your personal info section on Facebook become clickable. If you click on one, say someone put the movie Fight Club under favorite movies, you click and it searches for other people who also like Fight Club. It will show any of your friends who like the movie first, then searches in your networks for others. Not perfect but something.
And with all the personal info sections, only the ones you fill out show up. Some people don’t fill all or any out, so they won’t show at all. And I’ve seen apps that let you extend that info and put in whatever you want too.
Facebook isn’t as much good for meeting new people - a lot of people have their profile visibility limited to only their networks (region, college, high school, company) or only their friends. It’s targeted more on adding people you’ve already met somewhere else. You can even totally restrict people from searching for your name or contacting you at all unless you do it first. I think on MySpace you can make your profile private but people can still find you, but I’m not 100% sure. So I guess MySpace is better for finding totally new people or whatever.
Many of my friends have it filled in extensively. I’m surprised that you’ve never seen it on someone’s page before. Have you just been looking at your Wall and theirs, and not clicking on the Info tab? Or maybe your friend has you blocked from seeing that part of his profile? That’s another nice feature of Facebook: you can allow certain people to see only certain parts of your profile. Useful.
Maybe that’s why I like Facebook-- I’m not on there to meet random people who I don’t know. I want to stay in touch with or get back in touch with friends and colleagues. I’m not there to browse or be browsed by strangers.
You can do this on Facebook and groups will pop up, which you can browse. There are groups for just about every hobby, organization, cause, celebrity, politician, author, movie, etc., that you can imagine. You can post to those groups and become friends with the people in them who have the same interest.
ISTM that you having fully explored or uncovered all the aspects of Facebook, and are judging it based on a limited interface. Or maybe you want different things than what Facebook offers, which I think is more personalized and based on pre-existing relationships rather than meeting strangers. YMMV, but I find Facebook much easier to navigate, less obnoxious, and much more useful for hooking up with old friends than Myspace. I can’t tell you how many people I’m back in touch with that I haven’t spoken to in years or even decades since signing up for Facebook. It has been pretty great for me in that way.