Yes, that’s right. I have joined the huddled and unwashed masses, and I now have a facebook account.
Allow me to set one thing straight though! The only reason that I caved: to destroy one’s enemy, one must first understand one’s enemy. I still think the concept is fundamentally wrong, but just my first 2 days in facebook has shown me some of the things it does astoundingly well, which are major hurdles to any attempt to replace the thing.
Here’s the thing facebook does right. Connect people.
The people facebook presented me with that it thought I might want to be friends with? Whew! It does it’s job pretty well! I did things step-by-step just to see what it would give me. When I entered that I worked at Apple, it gave me a lot of people. When I narrowed down that I lived in portland, it gave me people from my area, primarily people from my downtown store. When I the entered my email address it gave me a bunch MORE people. (I started with the address “facebook@joshproehl.com” just to test this functionality.)
It seems to remember anyone who’s ever searched for my name, my email address, or tagged anything with either of those. This is impressive, and something I have no idea how to duplicate when designing a distributed social networking service. This one thing (which I had previously overlook due to my anti-facebookery) ? may be the thing that makes facebook worth saving rather than destroying. At the very least it’s an incredible hurdle to overcome.
I’m going to go approve some people as friends so that I can “write on their wall” in a snide and demeaning tone.
The only thing that bothers me about Facebook is that anyone can make an “application” for it — and everyone DOES. Most of these are obviously from some sort of template like “Which kind of ____ are you?” or whatever, which I really don’t care about. I find myself blocking several applications every single day on my home page feed thing, because I really do not care about them. Maybe there’s a way to “block all applications I don’t already have” or something… that would be useful, except that there may occasionally (although rarely) be an application I might actually want to use, but would never get to see it.
Your blog says that you have one comment, but when I try to go read it there is nuffin’. Are you completely moderating comments? In any case: HAH! I’m writing this now but when you’re reading it, it’ll be stale and out-of-date! Way to be behind the times man. Go do something current.
Mind if I quote my own comment? Trying to be more meta here or something… (and just messing with you)
@Ty
What also gets irritating is the tendency to disguise an app in the notification page… “(so-and-so) wants to add your birthday to her Calendar!” then you “Approve” the request, which causes YOU to “download” the app as well! Bah.
But yes, the ability to auto-ignore apps unless you seek them out would be brilliant.