Entries tagged with “Facebook” from Things You Don't Care About
So this week has had a pretty epic amount of peer pressure resistance failure on my part. After holding out from getting a Facebook account for probably 2-3 years longer than most people I know at this point, I finally gave in last Saturday and got myself an account. This was after being harangued by a fair number of friends for months, maybe even years now and generally resisting because....well, simply because I didn't really see what it offered to me I suppose. I've had a LinkedIn account for a while, which I got when I was looking for a new job a while back (that, obviously, never panned out). It seemed decent enough, but LinkedIn is very clearly a "work" networking tool, with a strong focus on the professional. For me, that seemed like enough in terms of social networking.
Facebook, on the other hand, is a lot murkier (Twitter, i think, can suffer from the same problem). That's where you see people who for some reason have their boss as a friend and then are surprised when he catches them calling in sick after posting pictures of their drunken antics the night before. Certainly, it's a networking tool that a lot of people still use to connect professionally, but the line is a lot blurrier -- or rather, people don't take into account that there's a line, even though the Facebook Lists feature allows you to segment your friends lists into "people I want to display my drunken antics to" and "people I need to maintain a professional relationship with." Not to mention it seems chock full of productivity-destroying games that may or may not be cleverly disguised scams.
On the other hand, I've also read articles and seen presentations on the web on how Facebook can be used productively -- though to be fair, a fair number of people trumpeting its usefulness are people who specialize in social media marketing. So, eventually, I cracked; already this week I've found it's a good way to keep in touch with people I don't necessarily have reason to talk to on a regular basis. Not only is this a nice thing socially, but maintaining those relationships is probably not a bad idea professionally either when I start job hunting again, or looking for roommates, or looking to unload furniture, or whatever else I might use it for. Thankfully, the games stuff can largely be avoided by judicious use of the ignore function (which I have made great use of this week). So far, I think it's been a net positive, and I sort of wonder if it wouldn't have been a good idea to get started with it long ago.
This week also marked the end of my "a cell phone is for making phone calls" mantra; after 3-4 people already got them at work, I finally went out and bought myself a Motorola Droid Thursday night. I admit I'd be looking a bit jealously at people's iPhones for a while, and I've been chatting with Deidei via Google Talk on her G1 too, which made having a phone that was a bit more than a phone seem pretty handy. When I went to Seattle this year for PAX, it was the first time when I really used a lot of text messaging and I realized how handy something like that might be when you can't really have a phone conversation.
Since the Droid is my first smartphone, it's a little hard for me to say how it compares to the iPhone, the G1, or the other offerings out there. However, I'm already finding stuff like being able to browse the web and SSH from my phone to be pretty damn handy, in addition to combining the features of an mp3 player and a PDA. Will I end up getting 30 bucks of value out of the data plan every month? I'm not sure, but at this point I wouldn't be surprised. I'm looking forward to trying out the navigation features next time I go to Chicago, as well as all the other apps you can get for it.
And despite these two failures of will, I've already got people trying to get me to join Twitter now....
Facebook, on the other hand, is a lot murkier (Twitter, i think, can suffer from the same problem). That's where you see people who for some reason have their boss as a friend and then are surprised when he catches them calling in sick after posting pictures of their drunken antics the night before. Certainly, it's a networking tool that a lot of people still use to connect professionally, but the line is a lot blurrier -- or rather, people don't take into account that there's a line, even though the Facebook Lists feature allows you to segment your friends lists into "people I want to display my drunken antics to" and "people I need to maintain a professional relationship with." Not to mention it seems chock full of productivity-destroying games that may or may not be cleverly disguised scams.
On the other hand, I've also read articles and seen presentations on the web on how Facebook can be used productively -- though to be fair, a fair number of people trumpeting its usefulness are people who specialize in social media marketing. So, eventually, I cracked; already this week I've found it's a good way to keep in touch with people I don't necessarily have reason to talk to on a regular basis. Not only is this a nice thing socially, but maintaining those relationships is probably not a bad idea professionally either when I start job hunting again, or looking for roommates, or looking to unload furniture, or whatever else I might use it for. Thankfully, the games stuff can largely be avoided by judicious use of the ignore function (which I have made great use of this week). So far, I think it's been a net positive, and I sort of wonder if it wouldn't have been a good idea to get started with it long ago.
This week also marked the end of my "a cell phone is for making phone calls" mantra; after 3-4 people already got them at work, I finally went out and bought myself a Motorola Droid Thursday night. I admit I'd be looking a bit jealously at people's iPhones for a while, and I've been chatting with Deidei via Google Talk on her G1 too, which made having a phone that was a bit more than a phone seem pretty handy. When I went to Seattle this year for PAX, it was the first time when I really used a lot of text messaging and I realized how handy something like that might be when you can't really have a phone conversation.
Since the Droid is my first smartphone, it's a little hard for me to say how it compares to the iPhone, the G1, or the other offerings out there. However, I'm already finding stuff like being able to browse the web and SSH from my phone to be pretty damn handy, in addition to combining the features of an mp3 player and a PDA. Will I end up getting 30 bucks of value out of the data plan every month? I'm not sure, but at this point I wouldn't be surprised. I'm looking forward to trying out the navigation features next time I go to Chicago, as well as all the other apps you can get for it.
And despite these two failures of will, I've already got people trying to get me to join Twitter now....
Feed Subscription
If you use an RSS reader, you can subscribe to a feed of all future entries tagged “Facebook”.