I signed my mom up so she can see what my brother and I are up to on a daily basis (we’re not very good sons, in terms of calling home). I can keep up with what my younger cousins are up to (they grow up so fast!). And the best part is I can continually judge my life against that of my high school classmates, without having to go to a reunion every ten years!
Or one can say he’s so busy with life that he doesn’t even have time to mess around with facebook.
Go ahead and sign up for it - it is free after all - just don’t get too comfy. First we started with Friendster, then after a couple of years it wasn’t cool anymore, so everyone moved to Myspace, then that wasn’t cool anymore and everyone moved to Facebook. Seeing as how my mom signed up to Facebook recently, I have a feeling it isn’t long for this world and something new will take its place soon.
I am trying to found the overly oppressive “WatchingYou” website now. The appeal will be that there will be zero privacy expectations and members will have their profiles automatically updated with things like credit scores, legal actions, and house values along with any other information that can be collected from the web. The beauty is that it will be an auto-join site. You can opt out but only with a handwritten, notarized, letter and 180 days notice.
I’ve restricted myself to family and family type friends. That way there’s little nonsense to deal with. A family I used to baby sit for - it’s such a pleasure to see their family reunion photos, a couple of cousin type friends who I’d otherwise only hear about through my mother. I use Plaxo for business types and I’ll email people who want to “friend” me and explain I only keep it for family. I havn’t joined any groups, but funnily enough I introduced my boss to it so now I get a ton of group updates on my work email.
I’m 35 and I use Facebook as do a LOT of my school friends and people I have worked with or am currently working with. My Mum is on there, my Dad, my mother in law, many of my cousins, etc. It’s really good for someone like me because I don’t like using a telephone for idle chat, and I’m too lazy to write people letters. With Facebook I can keep in touch with people without really having to do much. When they put photos up, I can look at them, and comment or just click a button that records that I “like” the photo.
The thing is, you can use it as much or as little as you want. You don’t need to update your status every day, and you don’t have to have a gazillion friends. You don’t need to get into all of the little games and quizzes that people do, and you can adjust your settings so that you don’t get bombarded with all that shit.
Overall I think it’s great.
Well, I found an old college drinking buddy, and my 20th high school reunion.:eek: Depending on your privacy settings it will show possible friends based on high school/ college/sports team/FOAF.
I don’t think that’s quite right. When you visit my profile, you can only see my status updates, my photos and links I’ve posted, my game info I’ve posted, etc. You can also see stuff that other people have said to me when they came to my profile and wrote on my “wall.” You can see notices that I have commented on other people’s statuses, but not their statuses or my comments.
The only things that “everyone” sees - and by everyone I mean friends-of-friends, not the general browsing public - is when you comment on someone else’s status. I can comment on your status if we’re friends, and your mom can also comment, and we can see each other’s comments. But I can’t see anything else about your mom because we’re not friends.
The only time you’ll see the status of friends-of-friends is if you log in as your friend and view their homepage…which isn’t something you should do anyway, as it’s not your account.
Look - are these people your friends or aren’t they? If they are, then they’ll be genuinely interested to know more about you. OK, some things might be embarrassing to reveal to a certain circle of friends. So don’t befriend your fellow scholars on FB. Or go ahead and befriend them, but then don’t link to your erotic fiction stuff. I have a firm rule against mixing work and personal life, so in the unlikely event that I get a friend request from somebody at work, I’ll just ignore it.
OK then… :dubious:
Is who my friends? My friends are people who know how to reach me, who have my private phone number, who know which e-mail I check hourly and which one I check every few weeks.
My question about facebook isn’t really about my friends–it’s about everyone else in the universe who seems to have access to information about me that maybe I don;t like sharing with the universe. To me, from what little I know, it’s like getting on the subway wearing a sandwich sign that reads:
"I have an upset stomach.
I’m going to try to cut down on my coffee.
I’m re-reading PORTNOY’s COMPLAINT now–it’s pretty good.
I didn’t sleep well last night.
I’m going to skip work later this week.
My shoes are too tight.
Some of my students aren’t doing the reading.
Yesterday was a beautiful day."
Why would I want to impose this crap on the world? Why would I want the world to know every stupid thought I’m having? I don’t get it.
The information can only be seen by people you explicitly designate as “friends” in Facebook. And you can’t do that unilaterally either–both people have to agree that they are to be “friends”.
I wouldn’t say that at all. I’m 34, and the vast majority of my friends on Facebook are in their 30s and 40s. The oldest friend I have on there is in her 70s. It’s used by a wide range of ages these days, no longer just college kids.
Ah that clears it up a bit. I thought you were familiar with basic FB functionality.
As the subsequent poster has said, only those people that you befriend can see your photos, activities, etc. Plus, by default, everybody in your network can see as well, so after you sign up you should go into your privacy settings and remove your network from the permitted list.
Here’s a snapshot of my current “news feed”. Many of those here who wish that the message board would allow image or video embedding will like that FB allows you to do such things, either on your own profile or on your friends’.
I don’t really want to make any effort to find you, but I want you to know how much better I am than you now, even though back in college you thought I was a geek
So don’t impose that crap on the world. Being part of Facebook is in no way an obligation to provide hourly status updates. You can leave the update blank if you like.
As for getting caught in white lies, that says more about you than Facebook. If you don’t want to get caught telling people bullshit, then don’t tell people bullshit. If you don’t want to see someone then just tell them, why lie to them?
Well, I’ll be that age next month, so maybe I will give it a try and see who might be out there.
My mom is ten years older than you, and she has a Facebook. I don’t think she uses it as much as I do, but she comments on my status updates and posts pictures of her dog from time to time.
One of my favorite uses for Facebook is the posting of links. Say I’m reading the news and I see an article I think my friends would find interesting. Most news media have a Facebook application button on their websites, so I can just click that and it automatically goes up on my FB feed and all my friends get a little blurb, usually with a relevant thumbnail photo of it on their feed. I’ve heard about loads and loads of news stories and read lots of good opinion columns that I might otherwise have missed because one of my friends posted it on Facebook. Because my friends are people that I share interests with - occasionally obscure interests - this is pretty cool. Like, I have FB friends that were, like me, Peace Corps Volunteers in Bulgaria and occasionally they’ll post Bulgaria stuff (music videos, articles about politics, etc.) that I like to see that I might have missed otherwise. It’s a spiffy tool.
Okay, so I joined, but I’m obviously not doing some stuff right (and Facebook isn’t designed to let me do it right very easily). I attended several universities (unlike my role model, Sarah Palin, I actually got a degree from each of them) but it only let me add one college. I can enter other universities but it doesn’t let me specify a graduation year, so I’m looking through everyone who ever graduated or attended (or it seems KNEW someone who attended) that uni. Not useful. Sucks, basically.
Even among my own listed college, it lists in my graduating year, people who definitely didn’t graduate that year. (Half the people it shows as women, for one thing, and you’d think I’d have noticed if there were any women in my graduating class.) Why does it ask you for your graduating class if they’re going to list people not in that class? Jay-zus.
I did find out that my college girlfriend’s mom, who I haven’t spoken to in several decades, just dropped dead. I wonder if a note of condolence is in order.
Also, I seem to spend a lot (A LOT) of time with the hourglass showing–Facebook sucks almost as bad as the SD this morning in that regard.
I joined FB because a lot of people from my choir and church were joining, as a tool to getting to know each other better. I have touched base with some people from high school, and old work colleagues. I DON’T post anything that I wouldn’t want the world to know about. There is no requirement to tell everyone everything. Our church has discussion groups on there which are handy for people who would like to be part of a book-study group or Sunday School class but have scheduling conflicts.
And I am 52.
My daughter is my “friend” on there, but has warned me about leaving her comments that she feels are inappropriate, ie. anything about potty-training her or her fear of raw chicken (she’s gotten over it…behold the power of Chicken Paprikash).