Facebook Talk

I recently found a pretty good post about how Facebook-style sites have gradually reduced the amount of time we invest into making meaningful relationships in exchange for dramatically increasing the amount of time we spend on trivial matters that we interpret as important or worthwhile, like posting on our friend’s wall or looking for an old highschool buddy you used to skip 4th period with. I can’t say I completely disagree with such a notion, as I tend to assume that if I poke somebody or message them on Facebook, I’ve fulfilled my daily quota of keeping in touch.

In one sense, it’s a blessing, because honestly how many of your friends on Facebook would you call and keep in touch with every day? I know my list wouldn’t be all that long. But at the same time, I do know that I haven’t talked to a few of my really close friends in a while and Facebook is certainly part of the blame. Is anybody else going to take a look at their recent wall comments and maybe give one or two of them an actual telephone call? I know I am.

Facebook

The Sydney Morning Herald recently ran a short blurb pondering the overzealousness of Facebook to hold their users guilty until proven innocent when it comes to stuff that can get you banned. Which got me thinking and Googling and before I knew it, I’d turned up at least a dozen stories written in the past year or so about users who had their Facebook account disabled for pretty bland violations. To make matters worse, most of the people had trouble getting a straight answer out of Facebook as to why their accounts were deleted in the first place.

Now granted, they did break the rules in some form, but in most case the infractions were ones that are being committed by tens of thousands of others (for instance, using a nickname as your Facebook name instead of your legal name.) But still, there are many good reasons for most of these rule infractions. For instance, some of my friends are almost forced to use their nickname instead of their real name because most people they know don’t even know their real name!

Facebook might want to consider hiring a few more people in their customer relations department, either to police these rule infractions a little more vigorously or to at least speed up the process of letting people know what’s going on when they suddenly can’t log into their account anymore.

Facebook

I recently read a post on Scobleizer ranting about Facebook’s 5,000 friends limit and it had the following quote:

First, a “friend” in Facebook is NOT a “real friend.” (Let’s define “real friend” for now as someone who you’d invite over to your house for dinner). In social networking software a “friend” is someone you want in your social network. Period. Nothing more. The fact that people assume that you should only have “real friends” in your social network is just plain wrong.

I actually found that quote on Web Community Forum, where the same basic argument was being made: Facebook is for social networking, first and foremost. And yet I was kind of shocked. People actually use Facebook in this manner? As a social network first and a way to keep in touch with real life friends second?

For me and almost all of my friends, we are the exact opposite. If I don’t know a person in Real Life, they don’t get to be my Facebook friend. It’s as simple as that. Facebook’s first primary was and still is to keep people in touch with each other. But I fully believe that the majority of Facebook users look at Facebook as a means to stay in touch with Real Life friends, not to make business contacts or even to make new friends via a social network.

Scoble goes on to argue that Facebook’s friends limit is akin to only being able to view 5,000 videos on YouTube or see 5,000 photos on Flickr. Sorry, but those are just poor analogies. How many people upload pirated clips of The Colbert Report or funny home movies to YouTube with the hopes of only their friends seeing it? Not many, because they probably don’t care who is watching the video along with them because it’s not personal! But with Facebook, if my friends are writing on my wall and I’m uploading photos of my trip to Asia last month, I really don’t want anybody and everybody seeing it. Why? Well, because it’s personal stuff that I only want my friends and family members (if that!) seeing.

Think of it this way. How many people have you met in Real Life that you initially met on Facebook? I feel extremely confident in guessing that many of you would put the number below three. I know I haven’t met that many people on there who have become instant “BFFs!!11oneone!” What about the fact that Facebook doesn’t allow you to look at people’s profiles unless you are already friends with them or are in their regional network? What other “social network” site does that? Not many, if any. I point all of these out only to illustrate that while there are a few people out there, mainly people on the net, who see Facebook as an endless rainbow of possibilities, you can’t forget the mass majority of people who look at it as nothing more than a way to keep in touch with folks.

Take my case for instance. The aformentioned Web Community Forum had this to say on their site:

I never thought of it replacing my Address Book. Is that what people are using it for?

Yep! I have my home address and phone number on my Facebook profile. Sorry kiddos, but I don’t want people knowing that information unless I actually know them. And many of my friends keep the same information on their profile, which eliminates the need to keep an address book around or even a contact list in my Gmail account. Everybody I know keeps their Facebook information up-to-date to the point where if I have a phone number for somebody stored in my cell phone and I see another number for them on Facebook, I’ll call the Facebook number first.

Nobody I know wastes their time with Facebook groups anymore. They’re pointless. And while I do have a few friends who love the Facebook Applications, most of my friends simply added a few and forgot all about them. For us, Facebook is a place to keep in touch with old high school and college buddies after we scatter across the country to different colleges and then later across the globe to different jobs. E-mail and AIM have become obsolete in my ring of friends and replaced by pokes and wall messages. This is a key fact that rings true for most people on Facebook.

Yes, I can understand how some people would want more than 5,000 friends if they didn’t hold the same views as myself. But frankly, how many social contacts can you really have? Imagine if you had 5K friends right now. Don’t you think that somewhere in there would be at least a few people spamming you? Do we really need people getting their profiles up to 50K friends just so they can sell their account on E-bay to a spammer or heck, spam us ourselves with their “new and awesome website!” or whatever other venture they’re tied into? Sure, some people might hate the 5k friends limit, but to say that it has no purpose is simply shortsighted. And to say that more people than just a small handful are being hurt by this simply shows how out of touch you are with the average Facebook user.

And besides, there’s always Myspace if you don’t like it

Speaking of drunken Facebook fun, it looks like Hugh Grant recently got his drink on and…well, I’m sure the rest of the evening was a bit too R rated to go into detail here on Facebook Talk.

But this brings me to another topic entirely. Where in the hell were all of these drunken celebrities when I was in college? Never once did I have a Hugh Grant or Bill Murray just wander into my dorm room looking for a refreshing beverage. The most famous person I ever drank with was my dad, but that doesn’t count since we’re related. I think the next most famous person was that RA during my junior year who owned three jet skis. He was a legend around campus!

[via Web Community Forum]

facebook, hugh grant, college parties, bill murray

Facebook, I need your help. I like to drink. There’s no real shocking or Earth-shattering news there. But what you don’t already know is that I like to get on Facebook when I’ve had a little too much delicious alcohol. There, I said it. I’m a Drunk Facebooker.

Now, short of implementing some breathalyser test before people can log onto Facebook, there’s not much that can stop me from destroying every shred of dignity I have left once I get the brilliant idea in my head that it’s a great time to get on Facebook after 10 Tequila shots! First, you’ve got the obligatory drunken wall posts. That’s just an absolute given. In fact, I’ll probably spent an hour making three drunken wall posts.

But then we move onto the more complicated matters. Like leaving a Facebook group and putting down a horribly stupid reason why. Who even does stuff like that? Oh yeah, drunk people. Very drunk people.

But you know what? It’s all good. Because when you wake up the next morning, it doesn’t take long to stroll through your browser history and see all the drunken comments you left on people’s walls. Or to look in your news feed and see all the stupid things you shouted out to everybody. And with just a few clicks of your mouse, you can make them all go away, as if they never happened. Ahh….

But wait! Suddenly you notice that you visited your old high school girlfriend’s profile. And after that, you went to the profile of that smoking hot chick in your chemistry class that you never talk to. And is that your History professor’s profile next on the list? And suddenly you vaguely remember adding them all as your friend and accompanying each request with a “hilarious” personal message explaining to them why you should totally hook up. And yes, that even goes for your professor.

In short, Facebook, help a brother out and make it so that we can rescind a friends request! There’s no reason that request should just float out there forever, even indefinitely if the receiving party decides to not answer it so that they can look at it and laugh whenever they want. Us alcoholics are pleading with you, Facebook! Do something to help us avoid living in eternal shame!

This goes further than Drunk Facebooking though. What if you send a friend request to Jim Smith only to quickly realize that’s not the Mr. J. Smith you happen to know. Should you really have to wait until he signs on, sees it, and starts messaging you asking who you are and how you know him? Wouldn’t it make more sense to be able to decline it on your own?

Call me crazy, but I think this would be a great additional feature to Facebook.

Facebook, drunk facebook, drunk facebooking

The always brilliant Ze Frank has a new song dedicated to social networks, kinda. If you ever watched The Show last year, then you should both love it and appreciate what he’s trying to get at. And if you have no idea what’s going on here, then here’s a cookie.

Ze Frank, Facebook

If you go to Stanford and wonder what you should take next semester to help further solidify your nerd status, then look no further than the official Facebook Application class being offered now.

It promises to…I don’t know, probably do something with Facebook. Honestly, I looked around on the net for a mission statement or something on this class and I found about 20 different things. All I can assume is their going to be studying Facebook and Applications and, if they finish early with all that, why in the world they took this stupid class. You can follow along on the excitement class by joining their Facebook group.

I did, however, absolutely love this quote from their group. It was recently posted in the update as to how the first meeting of this class went.

When we asked if the new apps on Facebook made it better, the energy in the room went flat, like a huge group sigh. (Interesting contradiction: A course about FB apps attracted people not thrilled with apps.)

Hahahaha. The very people who are taking the class aimed at analyzing Facebook applications don’t even think they add much to Facebook. Beyond awesome.