Facebook - useful tool or no?

Internet, social networking 1 Response »
Aug 102009

I’ve been on Facebook for several months now, giving it a try.  I skipped Myspace when it was all the rage, mainly because it was painful to look at and seemed to be full of teens.  But Facebook seemed to have more structure and less mess, making it at the very least readable.

I wasn’t on Facebook long before I started getting contacted by old classmates from high school.  My 20th reunion is coming up and they are using Facebook as a way to locate and keep in touch between now and then.  It’s actually working pretty well to keep a group of people in touch.  I’m doing the same thing with my family reunion, building a group of “friends” – in this case relatives – by looking for someone I can find and then using their friend list to find other people.

So now I’ve gathered a decent list of “friends”.  I log in once in awhile to check what they have to say.  I automatically pull my posts on my blog sites into Facebook via RSS so I’ve got a running list of entries for my Facebook friends to read.  But guess what?  No one, and I mean no one, comments on my articles.  Not one of my friends writes any type of article themselves or writes anything with any content.  Yes, there are a few things of interest – one girl is using the site as a way to keep all her friends up to date with her pregnancy.  But for the most part, my Wall is filled with STUFF.  “I’m eating X for breakfast”.  “I just took a shower”.  “Blah blah blah Mafia Wars”.  I’ve got to sift through so much junk to see if there’s anything important stuck in there that I missed.

I guess I expected more.  I expected actual conversations about things of importance.  There are significant things happening in our world today, and not one of my 33 Facebook friends has anything to say about them.  The one time one of their friends make an offhand political comment, I responded, and after a few volleys back and forth, they quit right when it was getting fun.

I’ll probably stick with it for awhile, but I’m very tempted to just email out my regular email addresses and abandon Facebook.  If it weren’t for the reunion stuff, I would have ditched it already.  It may be a useful tool for some, but for me it’s just another online persona that I have to keep up.

Posted by jason at 9:38 am

Digsby and Facebook

social networking No Responses »
Apr 212009

I’m no social butterfly – anyone who knows me can vouch for that.  However, I’m in the Internet business, for better or worse, and I have to stay reasonably up to date with the current “killer apps”.

Lately I mentioned that I’m using Digsby for AIM and Twitter.  I’ve been a Pidgin fan for a long time, but I think the Digsby Twitter plugin is much cooler and smoother than the Pidgin alternatives.  Twitter being the hot topic it is right now, I want to try and stick with it and use it, so having it handy on my Digsby list is helpful.

As for basic use, Pidgin and Digsby are pretty much interchangeable to me.  The differences right now are that Digsby has the best Twitter plugin, whereas Pidgin has better Jabber support, including group chat.  So, I’m still using both.  If either one were to add that final piece they are missing, I’d probably standardize with them.

Since I’m using Digsby and making a half-hearted attempt at Facebook, I figured I’d try their Facebook plugin.  I’m not sure yet what I think of this one.  The Twitter pluging is simple – add Tweets, list the most recent Tweets from the people you follow.  Easy, probably because the whole idea is so basic in the first place that it lends itself well to being an add-on or plug-in.

Facebook, on the other hand, has more going on, so there’s more to try and get into the plugin.  For the most part, it shows you your “wall”, any alerts, and the “news feed”, which I guess is all your friends’ walls.  If you authorize it enough times, you can update your “wall” directly from Digsby through a pop-up window, rather than having to open a browser.  Other than that, there are direct links to various parts of Facebook that launch your web browser.

I don’t know, the whole thing might start becoming more useful as I start adding friends to Facebook – we’ll see.  For now it’s just another place to send mini-blog messages to.  I’m already running two blog sites, helping my wife with hers, trying to Tweet once in awhile, and now I have another place that begs for content.  Blood from a turnip, blood from a turnip.

Posted by jason at 8:54 pm
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