While #1GF! and I were sitting around the table talking to her friends and their seventeen year old daughter, the following conversation took place…

Me: …right. You can put that one on your Myspace page.
17YO: [eyes narrowed] Ew. You don’t have a Myspace page do you?
Me: Uh, no.
17YO: Good because Myspace is for like horny twelve year olds and dirty old men.
Me: [laughing] No. No Myspace. I do have a Facebook page though.
17YO: Oh well that’s Ok.

While I will admit that I was surprised by this young woman’s opinion of Myspace, I wouldn’t say that it’s limited to her age group. To a lot of people, Myspace is a wasteland of people who want to be watched, and balding musicians who help them reach their goals. It might serve a purpose for exhibitionists and creeps, but it’s ugly, it’s cluttered, and like other social networking sites I’ve looked at in the past, it just doesn’t fit me.

Social Networking Is a Waste of Time

My first introduction to social networking was years ago when Friendster was in its infancy, and it fit this t-shirt and jeans guy like a shiny shirt and a set of velour pants. I really couldn’t understand the point of belonging to a site for the sole purpose of accumulating 5,000 “friends” that I would never interact with or talk to, so I quickly gave up trying. It wasn’t useful, it wasn’t fun, and the whole experience painted social networking as a big, pointless popularity contest that I didn’t want any part of.

Since then, I started using Netflix to share movie recommendations, FineTune to share music, and eventually del.icio.us to share some of the interesting things that I find on the web. Even though I had sworn off social networking, it seemed that I had been slowly easing back into it without meaning to. Once I realized what I was doing, I took the plunge and joined a full-fledged social networking site called LinkedIn to manage my business contacts and professional profile.

Unfortunately, after the initial stage of joining and adding a few contacts, I couldn’t find a compelling reason to continue using LinkedIn. It certainly lacked the chaos of Myspace or Friendster, but I think that it went too far in the opposite direction. If Friendster is a shiny shirt and velour pants, LinkedIn is a pressed, charcoal grey suit and a solid color tie. On LinkedIn, you don’t really connect with people. You connect with contacts. And you store those contacts like little cards in a Rolodex. Do you use a Rolodex anymore? I threw mine out years ago, and that’s exactly what I wanted to do with LinkedIn. And I’m not alone. To quote Steve Wilson of Sun Microsystems,

“Linkedin is Facebook for dinosaurs.”

Enter Facebook

Facebook was originally a closed social networking site for college students that opened up to the general public at the end of 2006. I avoided it altogether because of its resemblance to Myspace, but as more and more notable bloggers (such as Darren Rowse, Robert Scoble and Jeff Pulver) started moving to Facebook for professional social networking, it gave Facebook the credibility that it needed to convince me that signing up wouldn’t make me the old guy crashing the web’s biggest keg party and yelling, “WAAZZZAAAAAAP!!!”

I signed up to test it out, expecting nothing more than another plaid suit.

Because Facebook profiles are more three dimensional than LinkedIn’s dehumanizing “Name, employee number, resume’” format, I actually find that I can connect with the people on my contact list rather than filing them away. I can do everything that I could do on LinkedIn, but connecting is actually effortless and fun, which keeps me logging in day after day. The way I see it, connecting with people in a fun and meaningful way has always been the missing combination from the social networking puzzle, and Facebook has brought both pieces to the table. For the first time, I’ve found a social networking site that fits an average t-shirt and jeans kind of guy.

Some Things That You Can Do With Facebook

• Post a profile that includes interests, education, and work experience
• Post a picture and even host image galleries
• Find old friends more easily because Facebook profile pictures let you differentiate between the John Smith you know and the 250,000 others that you don’t
• Keep track of family, friends, and business contacts
• Granularly control who sees what profile information
• Introduce people to one another
• Join meaningless groups like the Sacred Order of the Stonecutters or more pertinent groups based on alumni, corporate, or locational affiliation
• Send and receive mail through the Facebook interface
• Sell things through the Marketplace or through Lemonade Stand
• Syndicate your blog into their Facebook page with Flog Blog
• Share your Finetune Friday playlists through Finetune for Facebook

In short, Facebook offers me a hundred different ways to stay connected with people every day that I would normally never utilize on my own.

Do me a favor, all you current readers and former coworkers: get on Facebook so I can stay connected with you, too.

Posted in Geeky