In Praise of Facebook

I never really thought that the whole social networking aspect of the web would appeal to me.  Of course as an engineering professional, I have an account on "LinkedIn", I mean, everyone does.  LinkedIn is networking taken to its impersonal extreme, but it's a great way to reconnect with old friends and colleagues, and damned if there aren't some interesting jobs posted up there from time-to-time.

So, if LinkedIn is a professional tool, then MySpace and Facebook were (in my opinion), web presences that forced parents to meter their children's Internet consumption.  Basically they were for kids.  I was vaguely familiar with Facebook from a couple years back reading about how it was for college students what MySpace was to pre-teens and high schoolers.

All of this changed when I red an article on a technical blog that indicated a couple of subtle (at least to me) changes to Facebook:

1. They were opening it up to everyone
2. The were opening the platform to developers and publishing an open Facebook API

Now, I didn't even know what this meant at the time, but as an old programmer, I was intrigued enough to pop over to Facebook and sign up for an account.  Once I did, I was at first at a bit of a loss as to what all the noise was about.  Then, I started playing around with applications.  Now, some of these are just plain silly, you know, time-wasters that allow you to, well, waste time.  But some of them are entirely useful.

As I dug deeper, I discovered some other pretty cool things about Facebook:

• It has built-in EMAIL, and now you can use it to send messages to non-Facebook members (this was not always the case)
• It tightly controls who you can invite to be your "friend".  You must demonstrate some type of relationship with someone before you can befriend them.  This prevents potential abusers from Spamming you with friendship requests.  This is enforced in a couple of ways; first Facebook will mine your EMAIL address book (GMAIL, Outlook, what have you) and send invitations to your contacts.  Secondly, you can join "networks" (workplaces, schools, etc.), but only if you have an EMAIL address within the domain of the network you wish to join.  I think this was primarily done to keep predators from joining middle/high school networks and trolling for children.
• By far, the biggest attraction of Facebook are the applications.  As I mentioned above, some of these are just plain fluff, but some are very nice and dare I say it, powerful.  There are people who are monetizing Facebook through the applications development space.  A really good application might attract 100's of thousands of users.  Add in some advertising and you've got a compelling money-maker.
• Facebook has groups.  A group can be anything you want it to be.  You could create a group for the "Ministry of Silly Walks", and people will most likely join it.  This is one way around the restrictive nature of networks.  So, while I can't joint he Wheelersburg High School network (sadly, I do not have an active EMAIL account for that domain), I can absolutely join the Wheelersburg High School Alumni group.

So, once I got started, it was hard to stop.  You feel mysteriously compelled to personalize your Facebook presence with all sorts of applications.  The best applications encourage you interact with your friends.  You might take a test with one of your friends to see how compatible your tastes are for, say, movies.

Also, everything you do, is added to your home page's "feed" in near real-time.  In addition, you get to see what your friends are doing.  So, for instance, if I join the "We Are Marshall" group, that action is logged on both my home page and on the home pages of all of my friends.  If I "poke" (sort of an Internet nudge), one of my friends, that's logged as well.

All-in-all, it's quite addictive.  I have to force myself away from it while I'm at work.  If you haven't joined it, I highly recommend joining.  Just make sure you have quite a bit of free time to explore it.  Once you start, it's hard to stop.

My big girl

My wife and I rescued Ashley about 6 years ago from an organization in Manchester, NH. She was a dead dog walkin' at a kill shelter in Ashtabula county Ohio. Several volunteers got a van of these guys together and drove them from Ohio to New Hampshire where they would be spared. Since that time, Ashley (named after the county in Ohio), has proven to be quite a handful. She was a perfect, if silly and spirited" dog for several years, then, about 3 years ago when we adopted our 4th (at the time) puppy, Titan, she started showing some pretty scary signs that something was wrong. Our odyssey to determine what was wrong with her led us to Angell Memorial hospital in Boston, where she was diagnosed with a mostly fatal illness called GME. I won't go into what this means, but basically she has lesions on her brain, which alter her perception drastically. Her head moves constantly, and her depth perception is shot. She cannot go up/down stairs, and it's very difficult for her to eat. The prescribed treatment is a steroid, which, while effective, will ultimately kill her by damaging her kidneys and other internal organs. Obviously, we went ahead with the steroid treatment in the hopes that she would go into remission. We treated her for 6 months, and the improvement was amazing. When we took her off the steroids however, she quickly relapsed, which meant another round of steroids, and another prescription. This time, the prescription was for a drug called Cyclosporine, which is used by organ transplant patients to help combat rejection of their new organs. It's unbelievably expensive, especially for a dog. We were paying about $400 a month for this, for about 6 months. After she stopped this, we had yet another relapse, where we moved to yet another drug, which she took for most of a year. Mercifully, this one was not as expensive, quite reasonable actually, and she's been off of it for about a month now. So far, no more relapses. It's been quite a long strange trip; it's amazing what you'll do for your animals, especially when you don't have children and you (thank God) have a reasonable amount of disposable income. I imagine that when all is said and done, I've spent around $5000 on Ashley's care over the last 3 years. When you love a (any) dog like I do, this isn't really a choice; if you got the money, you spend it, but I sometimes wonder if we did the right thing. Ashley is happy now, she loves to eat and sleep, but she's clearly not the same dog I adopted 6 years ago. She isn't as playful, and she seems addled most of the time. She's still affectionate with me, but can be grumpy with Titan, who, for a while, was her best friend. I guess at the end of the day, my question is put to bed when, after we've all gone to bed for the evening, Ashley curls up next to my head on my pillow and lapses into sleep, just as she's done since she was old enough to jump into bed with us. I wouldn't trade that for all the money in the world...