Informative article about the growth of Facebook, its reach and power, and the actions of its young, didn't take the money and run, founder and CEO. I assume everyone reading this knows about FB by now, but here's the intro, just to give you the flavor.
Facebook held no appeal for Peter Lichtenstein. The New Paltz, N.Y., resident had checked out so-called social networking sites before, and he wasn't impressed. ("MySpace," he recalls, "was ridiculous.")
A chiropractor and acupuncturist, Lichtenstein was already a member of a few professional web-based user groups. The last thing he needed was another message box to check. Then a buddy posted a link to photos from a trip to Thailand and India on his Facebook page and flatly refused to distribute them any other way. The friend's assumption: Duh - everyone's on Facebook.
And so Lichtenstein, 57, recently became an official member of the Facebook army, 175 million strong and, Facebook says, growing at the astounding rate of about five million new users a week, making it a rare bright spot in a dismal economy. If Facebook were a country, it would have a population nearly as large as Brazil's.
Since the write up is from Fortune Magazine, most of the rest of the article is about the business implications of FB, and the ways they're trying (with middling success) to monetize the service. I'm not going to delve into that aspect of things here, but I enjoyed reading the article.
Personally, I've got no use for FB. In one way, I've been online too long. I've been running this site since 2001, I was working on other websites several years before then, and I went through my "lots of online friends" phase in about 1998, when I had like 150 contacts on my ICQ. One key difference between then and now, was that back then everyone tried to be anonymous online. No one used their real name, no one posted pictures or locations or other easily-identifiable info, and the concept of a FB style page with your real name and contact info would have seemed like madness.
I gave up on the anonymity thing after a few years, and I've always had my own name and photos on this website, but I still feel sort of weird about it, at times. And I'd never consider posting my phone or address online, though I'm sure people could spy those out if they searched databases. NetSol won't help, though, since the address listed for this site's owner info is like, 3 apartments ago.
So it wasn't delusions of semi-anonymity that kept me from embracing social networking sites. It was a non-desire to contact online with people I knew in real life, but the state of those sites in the early days didn't help either. I agree with the quote from the chiropractor at the start of the quote article; I checked out MySpace early on, and quickly rejected it as a joke. Geocities style technicolored unreadable crap for (and by) hyperactive 14 y/os. Even the professional sites by rock bands and companies were basically unviewable, to anyone with an adult visual sensibility or some experience doing web design. I might have put up with that, and been the one person with a non-hideous scroll-fest of a myspace page, but I didn't see the use or function of it. I had a real website, after all.
Thanks to my disinterest in MySpace, I didn't pay any attention to FB when it started to get hype a few years ago. "MySpace for college kids," I dismissed it as, though I researched it a bit a couple of years ago, when I was finishing up my degree and talking to students who were on FB, as well as looking into ways to publicize my misbegotten HGL fansite. FB failed on that front since it didn't seem to have any way to form user groups by interests; just by location or real life experience. I signed up anyway (I don't even recall with what name) since a couple of girls I liked in college were on the service (as is every college aged kid in the US) and I knew their names but didn't have any other way to contact them outside of class.
I didn't do anything with my FB beyond filling in some of the info boxes and uploading some photos, and haven't checked it in months and months, at this point. Looking at the service now, I can't see when I'll ever want to use it, since it's all about connecting with people you know or knew in real life. Frankly, I connect with everyone I want to connect with in real life already. And none of those connections are handled online, other than via occasional emails. I know one person I went to high school with, and haven't heard from, seen, or thought of anyone else from HS since before I moved to the Bay Area in 2003. (Not that I wanted to see anyone from HS back then either, but I'd occasionally see someone I vaguely remembered while I worked at the stadium.)
I haven't seen or talked to anyone from my first college experience when I was 19-21 since then. I didn't socialize much then, my friends were generally adults in their late 20s, and my main reason for not wanting to go to college after HS was that I didn't like people my own age and wanted not to be around more of the giggling idiotic bullshit that made HS such a waste of time. At this point I can't remember anyone from college other than 2 girls I hooked up with and was friends with for a year or two during the process. And some fond memories aside, I don't want to meet either of them again. They were both at least half a decade older than me, and I'm betting the years have not been kind. I'd much rather remember then youthful and desirable than wrinkled and motherly.
I worked at the stadium in SD for over a decade, but I never once socialized outside of work, and while I enjoyed talking to some of the guys on the job, I didn't even consider getting anyone's name or number when I was overjoyed to quit abruptly and move up north to live with Malaya.
I knew lots of the kids in my recent college career were on FB, but other than setting up a page to try to get a couple of dates (one of which sort of worked out) I never used it for anything. The age/maturity/interests difference was too great, since I could get along with 20 y/os talking to them in class, and obviously I wanted to tap some of the delightful young ladies, but I couldn't socialize with them. They were too young, too immature, so caught up in their little living on campus college dramas, and I wasn't interested in immersing myself in that world even when I was that age, so I certainly wasn't now.
I could continue, but you get the idea. I've always been much more into having a few close friends than a wide circle of acquaintances, and I've never cared about gossip or following other people's real life activities. And since I don't want to reconnect with people I knew in HS, or college, or work, or college again, I don't have any use for FB.
Ironically, I know a lot about FB for two reasons. For one, a lot of the women I've had dates with lately, via my online dating efforts, have been on FB. And when we talk about our lives over drinks and I mention my online exploits, that's what most of them counter with. Real people don't have websites or know that much about the Internet. They just do some emails and YouTube; and FB, these days. Lots of people use it for work, or have to use it through their work, for networking or other such purposes. That's the only way I can see me ever getting into it, actually. If I got more into my writing career, published some books, did some fan activities, went to writing conventions, etc. It would be a useful networking business tool then, though I think that's the level I'd keep it at; actual friends I'd continue to interact with directly via email or phone or personal meetings.
My other source of FB exposure has come from the IG. She was not one of the two women I signed up to FB to pursue, but now that we've been good friends since Fall 2006, I've heard her talk about FB many times. It's been informative. She loves it, but keeps trying to quit it, Brokeback Mountain style. She hates the time sink nature of it; how it leads her into reading stupid pointless bullshit written on the walls of her friends and how she feels compelled to reply to dumb comments just to be sociable. She wishes it didn't lead her to semi-stalk friends by checking who has been talking to who, or make her feel jealous or bitter or ignored when someone doesn't reply back to her, or comment on some update she's posted. And she really hates the cliquey nature of it, the gossip and cat fighting it creates.
Demographically and geographically, she's an ideal customer. She's 22 now, so she's got a circle of high school friends, lots more from college, others from her various jobs, etc. And then she expands that to friends of friends, business contacts, friends or children of her parents, and so on. All of which is exactly why the service works, and why there are 175m registered users, even if only like 40m of those are still actually active.
I'm not saying it sucks or that it shouldn't exist, I just think it's not suited to me. Or more accurately, I'm not temperamentally suited to it, with my preference for real life relations with a very few close friends, and much more occasional and superficial online relations with a much wider, entirely digital circle of acquaintances. YMMV, and in fact it probably does. And no, you may not "friend" me. Don't worry, I shall return the non-favor.
Labels: facebook, the internet
