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.