Facebook Talk

So I’ve been out of the country for a while, visiting some friends in Australia, when something hit me. Facebook is just as big over here as it is back home. It actually took a while, but Facebook has managed to ingrain itself into the daily lives of students over here just as it has with us back stateside.

I studied here in Australia back in 2005 and the only way I kept in touch with my friends back home was through Facebook. I had bene on Facebook since mid-2004, so you could say I’d been ensnared by Facebook’s grasp for quite a while at that point. But try as I may, I couldn’t find a way for any of my Aussie friends to sign up as well, despite the fact that they had .edu e-mail addresses just like I did, which if you remember was a requirement to sign up for Facebook back in 2005. Instead, most of my mates here had accounts with Hi5, some crappy myspace-esque site that nobody actually used. Instead, people would get an e-mail saying they’d been invited, sign up and create an account, add a few friends, and then promptly forget all about it. Sounds exciting, huh?

I came home during the sumer of ‘05, but I came back for a visit in October of the same year. I was just as hooked on Facebook as I’d ever been, but still, nobody here had an account. It was funny, I’d go to the computer labs to check my e-mail and you could instantly tell which of the hundred or so students in there were fellow Americans - they were always checking their Facebook accounts!

Then, I came back over for a visit in September ‘06. By now, Facebook had opened up to the world and people anywhere could sign up. And yet nobody here had an account! Mates here would always see me poking people back home or writing on their wall and they’d ask just what in the heck I was doing, but when I explained it to them, they’d just look at me like I was an idiot. I managed to get one of my friends here to sign up though and upon doing so, she instantly loved it. But try as I might, she was the only local Aussie who cared enough to give it a go.

Then something funny happened when I came back home. Starting around Christmas of ‘06, I started to get a trickle of invitations from my mates here. By March, at least half of the people I knew had signed up. By July, there were only one or two holdouts. And it was fantastic! Finally, I could keep in touch with all my Australian friends without having to go through e-mail or MSN (while AOL’s AIM service is what most people back in the states use to chat, over here it’s MSN Messenger). I could communicate with my family, high school, college, and foreign friends all on one website and if you have friends spread all over the world like I do, you don’t need me telling you just how damn convenient that is.

And now that I’m back in Australia, I can see first hand just how much people love Facebook over here. Now when I go to people’s dorm rooms, chances are they’re messing with Facebook. When I walk into the computer lab, instead of three or four computers trained on Facebook, 40 or 50 might be! And it’s awesome finally being able to talk about things I read or did on Facebook with my Aussie friends without them looking at me like I’m speaking another language.

So what about you? Do you have any experiences where you were in a foreign place and found yourself struck by the glories that are 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