(I searched some on this in here and didn’t find anything, but then my Google-fu sucks…)
I’m confused about Facebook. I thought it was a teen thing, but it keeps showing up everywhere. Can someone give me a brief recap on what it’s all about, if it is an all age thing after all and, I guess, what the point is?
Gracias!
You might as well just sign up.
It started as a tool pitched to college kids (and originally, you needed an .edu email address to sign up, but that’s long gone now). But now it’s in more general use. You can use it as a way to keep in touch with folks – you can post “status updates” about what’s going on in your life and most people post a lot of photos as well. Mostly, it’s a really effective way to, without much attention, keep tabs on people you knew in high school or college that you aren’t good enough friends with that you see each other often, but you don’t want them to drop of the face of the earth, either. Just yesterday, in fact, we went to lunch with my wife’s cousin from Toronto that she hasn’t seen in 15 years. He was in town visiting some other friends, and we never would have known about it except for Facebook.
–Cliffy
It’s a social-networking site, which started being for college students, and now is open to anyone. The point is to keep in touch with people you know, and perhaps also meet new people. It can also be used to organise social events.
Yes, to an extent it’s an age thing, because we old codgers generally didn’t have anything like it hen we were young, and most of us don’t really understand this kind of social networking. I’m not an extensive user of Facebook, but I do use it a little – earlier today, I exchanged messages with a guy that I shared a house with more than 30 years ago, so there are a few old codgers on it.
One way it differs from a message board like the SDMB is that generally people use their real names on Facebook and pseudonyms on the SDMB. However, the SDMB can be used for social networking too.
Aside from the obvious…http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook
It’s an easy way for you to look up friends, family and old acquintences that you may have lost touch with. You can also start groups and keep in touch with them specifically. Like, if you have a grade-school group you want to hook up with you can look them up or you can be found by others looking for you. Once you are found you automatically get to see the people that they found (besides yourself) so networking in this manner is exceptionally easy. You can start threads just for that group and instant messaging is part of the deal too. You can also send messages to any person’s inbox just like email. You can also recieve messages through your usual email (Yahoo, Gmail, etc) that link to the inbox from Facebook.
Give it a try, it’s the only way to experience its usefullness.
It’s also mobile friendly so you can do it from a web phone or some such device.
You can also use Facebook to keep those in your friends list updated on any and everything going on in your life and they will “see” your updates as soon as you post them.
Facebook was created first just for Harvard students, then they opened it up to other Ivy League students, then all people with a .edu email address, then teens, then eventually everyone.
The simple, basic explanation is that you sign up, join a network which is most likely your city or metro area, or college (when I joined it was still just for college students so my network was my college, by default). You set up your profile. You search for some friends and/or family members and ask them to be your friend on Facebook. After you have some friends, when you log in you will see on your homepage stuff like their latest status updates, pictures they recently posted, games they recently played, etc. When you update your status, post pictures and play games, your tidbits of info will be displayed on THEIR homepage.
There’s more to it but not much more. It’s pretty simple and slick.
Thanks all - I’m going to start with this post because of this —>
Oh yeah - duh.
Heh, I don’t pay to have my cell do the internet. 
I’ll look at the Wiki link, but I take it that you can search for people on Facebook, provided they are themselves on it?
How is that different from having one’s own webpages? Does Facebook send an email to your friends?
I hesitate to sign up because I’m already on LinkedIn and something else, because friends sent me invites. And this board, and other boards, and regular email… 
It’s aggregated. Your stuff shows up on all your friends’ homepages right away, and theirs (all of theirs) shows up on yours. I liken it to watching your friends lives go by as if you were watching them on TV. You get all the info without having to actually interact with them. But you CAN if you want to.
As of when I joined (about a year ago, I think), I didn’t have to specify any specific network at all.
Ah. Not sure it’s something for me, but I’ll give it a look.
Thanks much!
I don’t really do a lot of social networking, but Facebook has been great in terms of reconnecting with people I want to reconnect with, as well as for my photography business. Everybody from teens to my friends parents and grandparents seem to be on there, so it’s certainly worth a look.
I like being able to keep my people up on my goings-on, but JUST MY people-- I don’t like things being out there for the whole universe. So sort of like having a webpage that only the people you want to see can see. Nice way to sort of passively keep in touch, in case Christmas cards don’t cut it. More immediate and casual.
Your Straight Dope Fu is indeed a little weak right now. I asked basically the same question one month ago and got lots of good responses. I have had pretty good luck since then and tons of people that I haven’t seen in up to 20 years have written me like no time has passed at all. About 90% of them are female and many are still quite attractive so I am not complaining. I grew up in a very small town and then moved 2000 miles away so it is nice to know that some people were still wondering after all this time.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=523259&highlight=facebook
Huh. I put the word “facebook” in the search and looked at the first 3-4 pages, none of which showed a thread like yours. I didn’t notice, however, how far back 3-4 pages went, so maybe I didn’t realize that wasn’t that far in the past. Or should I have put something more specific in the search?
I just knew the title of my thread so it was easy for me to find. However, as a general tip, be careful when you do a search for key words. There are options for searching by thread title and by keywords in the entire thread. The term “Facebook” pops up all over the place in whole threads so it will produce a lot of garbage if you don’t use the drop-down box to search within thread titles only. That is true for a whole lot of subjects on this board.
Guess I should have used advanced search.
I looked at your thread and it appears that Facebook isn’t really all that useful to folks over 30, so I guess it isn’t for me.
OK, here is what has kept me from joining Facebook, other than being a retrograde old fart terrified of anything new, especially technology: I value my privacy.
I don’t want my ex- to know when I’m travelling to Europe so she can make my kids available to me for exactly the period when I’ll be unable to see them, or to know that I can afford to travel to Europe so why can’t I pay more child-support?
I don’t want my students to know jackshit about my private life.
I don’t want the woman I went out with last night, whom I told I’d be crazy-busy for the next twelve nights working long days and nights to know how utterly free I am.
I don’t want my daughters to know anything about who I’m dating, until I want to introduce them to her.
I don’t want my peers and fellow scholars to link to the erotic fiction I sometimes publish.
I don’t want my erotic-lit fans to know that I’m a boring professor of literature.
I don’t want the general public to know my offensive and rabid views on religion and politics.
It seems to me that everyone on Facebook gets caught up in all sorts of white lies, depending on what info they’ve made public. Why do I want to put all this out there where anyone can access it? Or is it set up so I could be out there, but keep my stuff private? How would that work?
I am 36 and have gotten some value out of it. I don’t play any of the silly games that they offer or publish my dinner foods or my bed-time schedule like some people do. I write to people almost daily though because the correspondence comes in pretty fast at least for me. I don’t know how long that will last and, if I decide I don’t like it anymore, I can just delete my account. I suggest giving it a try because it is free. You may be get some nice surprises (or maybe not) but it is set up so that everything is relatively secure and you can share or not share whatever you want too.
prr, there are indeed extensive privacy settings. You can lock down your account entirely so that the only people who can see anything are people you deliberately give access to. Or you can lock away sections of your profile so they can only be seen by a selected list of people. You can control who can find you by searching for you and what they can see. And you can even control what updates are shown to your facebook friends. If you’re careful about choosing the settings, I don’t think you would have anyone learning anything they shouldn’t.
I’m 52 and signed up for FB about six months ago. It’s cool for quite a few reasons. Among those are that I’ve reconnected with some of my college friends, who seem to have gone from fresh-faced youth to grandparents in the snap of a finger. I’m also friends with cousins and second cousins whom I almost never see, so it’s fun to see pictures and get updates of what’s going on in their lives. Because I am a college professor, I am careful about what I post, and I almost never put stuff about my personal life on there–who I’m dating, where I’m going, and so on. My page is set to private, so only the people I have agreed to friend can see it.
BUT–for me FB also has a few drawbacks. The primary one is that I was raised as a fundamentalist Baptist by staunch Republicans, and now I am pretty much the opposite of that–agnostic, liberal. But most of those old friends I’ve connected with are still religious and conservative, and for me that presents a few problems. It seems like if I post something making fun of Sarah Palin, for example, or in favor of gay marriage, the next day they post something supporting Palin or against gay marriage. It’s like there’s a bit of a feud going on, and I don’t like that. I also don’t like that a 78-year-old friend of my parents friended me and can now read some of the comments I make that reflect my non-religious, liberal ways. But I don’t mind it so much that I’ll leave Facebook, because I’m kind of proud of who I am, you know?
You can set it up so that only friends who you’ve approved can see your profile. The only problem might be that friends of friends will see your status updates on the mutual friends’ page. For example, cousin A and I are friends. If cousin B is friends with A, B will see my status updates on A’s page. In my experience, no one puts anything all that private in the status updates- it’s usually something like “on the way to a BBQ” or “10 days till vacation”. People tend to have friends from all stages of their life- my friends include a bunch of cousins, a bunch of my mother’s cousins, an aunt, an uncle, grade school classmates, high school classmates, college classmates and friends from my adult life who’ve moved away. I don’t put anything up that I don’t want my mother to know. That stuff goes in messages to individual people.