phinnia | no, seriously. i really want to know this.

Current Mood: cynical
Current Location: home
Current Music: all the way to reno - r.e.m

Entry tags:

no, seriously. i really want to know this.

What's the point of Facebook? It seems to be getting quite popular but I still fail to understand why. You can't really do much with it except turn people into zombies or whateveritis.

I have spent most of the past few hours playing with my new ball winder and yarn swift. They are named Denna and Richard, respectively. I have so far wound most of a ball of yarn; my mind is actually quite calm except for the niggling part that keeps pointing out what else we could have done with those four hours.

I swear if there weren't guilt in the world I wouldn't know what to do with myself.

(the other two wee dragons/eggs are 'hidden' due to sickness.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

What I do with face book is play a lot of scrabble like games and such like wordscraper is the current favorite.

That's precisely how I use it. Also, I have a nephew, a mother-in-law, and a handful of other random people on it whom I interact with fairly superficially there. I don't install all the random applications like Growing Things, Eggs, Karma, etc. I don't understand their popularity.

Facebook is Livejournal without the content. It's a platform to alert people in a closed network to news and events, with no room for back-and-forth communication.

Pretty much everyone in my age bracket would not ever be able to plan anything or know what is going on with anyone without facebook. In all seriousness, though, it is very good for event planning.

What's the point of Facebook?

The only way to keep track of my brother when I can't talk to him. :)

You too? That's exactly why I'm on Facebook also. (Well, to follow my own hard-to-reach brother, I mean, not yours. lol. That would just be weird.)

Also to keep tabs on my friends in Boston and Houston who don't keep blogs.

It's just like MySpace to me, a thing I have and usually forget about entirely till I get an email about it. :lol:

Well, I think Facebook can be fun for the games and virtual gifts and goofy stuff like that. And I did actually reconnect with a couple of rl friends through it, though 95% of my friends there were friends here first lol. (Myspace is utterly worthless imo and not fun in the least...) I haven't logged into Facebook for weeks though, I mean it's not like LJ where I want to check it every ~~few minutes~~ day.

...Dragons can get sick? D:

Yes, they can - if you go to their view page and it says something about 'the shell of this dragon is soft like there's somtehing wrong with it' or that the hatchling looks sick and it hasn't eaten and it doesn't move (i forget the exact wording, but whatever) you go to 'actions' and then 'hide'. Leave them hidden until the message goes away. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it does...but does it alert you that they're sick, or do you have to keep reading their description?

You have to keep reading their description.

It's a way for me to keep track of old classmates and co-workers. Folks who either don't use LJ or aren't in my life in the LJ sort of way. It's not as obnoxious as Myspace, nor as money-hungry as Classmates.com.

ball winder! swift! yeah! my dad helped me fine-tune my plans for my bicycle-based spinning-wheel. I was getting stuck on the treadling mechanism and now it's full speed ahead! which means, getting to the used bike places to see if they have busted-up parts I can have, since I just need a handful. er, half a bike's worth. um.

additionally - I am made of fail and didn't get your needlecase out last week because last week became made of Busy. however, I need to make a *big* run to the postoffice and it'll ship then + surprises :)

Facebook:
totally awesome for college setting.
I know a lot of people with whom I am not particularly close friends, as seems to be the norm for college. so Facebook is an easy, centralised way for us to keep track of each other and what's going on in each other's lives - all the more so when folks move off campus or go abroad or graduate or go on internships or whatever and you can't just run into them day-to-day. could it be done more directly? like, emails and phonecalls to the people you want to know about? yeah, but, who has the time? and plus direct communication is awkward sometimes especially with those folks you don't know that well, just sat next to for a year in ANPS 019/021 or whatever. or who go to school somewhere (maybe with you) now and you haven't seen since middle school and so you want to poke around in their life without actually having to interact with them.
as others have mentioned, it also ROCKS for event planning. you can reach everyone - and your list of friends reminds you who "everyone" is so you actually get EVERYONE - all at once with standard info on the event, AND rsvp'ing is way way way easier when someone just has to click "yes/no/maybe" instead of calling or emailing. (see above re: laziness of college students in communication.) you can also then update whoever says they're attending, and if you have to change a time/date/location EVERYONE finds out. again with the not trying to remember if you've told everyone. (and if you're promoting an event, the guests who've rsvp'd can then forward the invite to everyone THEY know, and...)
so I'm a big fan. I don't really have much for apps, especially now that scrabulous got axed. just info applications - yay genderform!, SGO, and relationships+. to cover all of me that facebook ignores. and also honesty box, because I think that kind of thing is awesome.

It baffles me. I know people who spend hours on it, and I get bored after 5 minutes.

I think how long you can spend on it depends how much you like to spend nosing around in others' lives. :P

"ooh, here's that girl I had a crush on, what is she doing now? what classes? where's she been? who is THAT?! *click* do I know them? hey, they have 1500 photos, I must recognise one. but they went on a trip with so-and-so?! I went to middle school with them! that's been a long time. *click* ohgodwhathappenedtoHER." etc.

Facebook, for me, is a glorified address book and photo album. That's all, really.

Have to say, I've never understood the use of Facebook beyond, say, Scrabulous *koff* Wordscraper.

(Needless to say, I don't have an account.)

Most of my friends from HS are on facebook, I use it to keep track of school events (They announce them there), it isnt as laggy (to me) as myspace, either.

Oh, yes, the other thing besides games there is that some folks from other countries, like say Bryan's mom, his brother etc. are willing to get on there, but would never sign up for something like LJ. It's good for that. It has a instant messenger thing on it so occasionally talk to them that way, play various games with them and such like.

I use FB to talk to old friends, and to play games.

Facebook is a great way to get in contact with people you never thought you'd get in contact with again! I have found so many old friends through Facebook. I found my dad and my brother through facebook, too.

I have one...I got it last year I think...but have never used it...

couldn't figure it out...
so I stuck with myspace...
and now NOBODY uses myspace...
(or at least no one on myspace ever seems to talk to me anymore...which is LAME)
XD

I love LJ *hugs it*

Can I have my swift back? I keep forgetting about it.

anytime, hon! <3

I use Facebook to stalk people from my childhood/high school, and also random attractive people from college classes. I reconnected with a lot of people from my hometown on there. Back when it was for college students only, we would plan study groups and things (there was a feature where you could see who was in your classes).

I was drawn to FBOOK for creepy reasons lollll, and have stayed b/c I don't use instant messaging and hate talking on the phone to people that I'm not really close too. IDK.

I... have a facebook and I still have no clue why. I think the only reason I have it is so that I can point at it and go, "Look, I have a facebook."

Oh, and my hubby posts his pics on that, and apparently, I'm obligated to comment, for which I need an account. Not that I mind; Ben's pics tend to be awesome.

Facebook is good for:
-keeping the long distance phone bills down when all your friends live in different countries
-embarrasing friends and relatives by tagging them in horrible pictures
-event planning (this is a serious one, it really is great for that)
-stalking your exes
-pretending that you're keeping in contact with people that you otherwise would never think of again

I finally signed up so I could see the (nonpublic) pictures that a high school friend posted of his new baby. I haven't figured out yet what I'll use it for, if anything.

From a college student's perspective: I'm not an obsessive Facebook user; while I sometimes use it to keep up with far-flung friends with the occasional message (though more just to convey 'I'm alive!' than have deep meaningful conversations), more frequently it's just for quickly looking phone numbers or e-mails when I need to get in touch with someone nearby and don't have it immediately on me. Handy, that.

I think I signed up for one, 5 years and three email addresses ago, back when it was 'private'.

I now can't even log in, even if I wanted to.

I changed to Facebook, because 1) Myspace NEVER works and 2) my cousins are there and I can look at their pictures (Tokyo :D).
I don't really like it, but it's much better than Myspace.

I use Facebook primarily to track down old friends from school. Yeah, I do some of the silly stuff, but mostly we just catch up with each other, use it to touch base, etc. I've actually found a bunch of people I went to grade school with, which is really cool.

Jellus jellus of the ball winder & swift!

That is so cool!

I just started a pair of toe-up socks, my first time doing toe-ups. My hair is turning grayer as I knit.

Note: I didn´t read all the comments, sorry *shrug*

I so agree with you, I´ve had like 20 people around me asking me why I´m not on FB.

"Because I´m on LJ." Is always my answer and they go like 'what???'

I so do not see the point of FB other then people knowing where you are in the world, if people want to know where I am, they can pick up the cell and call me :)

There are a lot of things that Facebook is good at. I sometimes see "I don't get it!" posts from people and often what it boils down to is that what Facebook is good at is not something that applies to that person.

The first thing to realize is that Facebook is primarily good as an online extension of your in-person social network. It is not very good at online-only socializing the way LiveJournal is, but it excels at extending the connectedness of your in-person circle of friends.

How does it do that? Well, first of all, it makes it very easy for people to find you based on your real-life identity. It's good at getting you in touch with people who you have or had meatspace connections with who you've lost touch with or don't yet have extended contact with.

It's MUCH better at RL-identity-driven photo sharing than sites like Flickr or Livejournal. Because every photo can be tagged with the identity of everyone who is in the photo (and it's much more likely that everyone in the photo is on Facebook), it not only makes it easy for people to find photos of you and see your latest photos (whether you took them or not), but it makes it easy to connect with other people who were in the photo. Went to a party? You don't need to have every person at the party posting all their photos of the party into their own individual islands online. Instead, anybody who posts them can make them relevant to everyone who appears in the photo, and anybody who knows any of the people in the photo can tag anybody in the photo who's not recognized. I put up a class photo of my 4th grade class once. I had exactly one other person from that class on my friends on Facebook (which is why I shared the photo). Within a day, the collaborative effort of me showing them and them showing the three people they knew and those people showing the people they knew, etc., had not only added about 20 people to my social network but had identified every single kid in the photograph and shared news on some of them that I would never have found out otherwise.

Also, it allows for low-bandwidth, low-effort communication who already have a ton of social context to bring meaning. On LJ, you can make high-bandwidth, high-effort posts that are fully readable even by strangers who have never met you before, but are probably overkill if you're just wanting to make a joke about the party you're at to someone else who was also at the party. Facebook updates are very good at that.

It also is very accessible to people who don't spend a lot of time online, for that reason -- quick updates, not a lot of time commitment.

It has a very good event scheduling system that is much better than similar services like evite.

Its application platform is very good at building fun, lightweight things to do that can make the net socially fun, again, for people who share another non-internet context. Things that seem stupid and superficial to people who build strong social networks purely online seem fun and sometimes meaningful between people who see each other three times a week because of that shared context.

Lastly, a lot of people use it to play games. For the past several months, almost all I've done on Facebook is respond to event invitations and play Tiny Adventures, which is ridiculously addictive for reasons I can't readily explain. Before that, I played tons of Scrabulous.

okoshun plays tons of this game that's kind of like Boggle.

AHA.

YES. THIS IS EXACTLY THE ANSWER I'M LOOKING FOR.

honestly, it is. it not only told me what facebook was good for, but also told me exactly why I find it vaguely pointless. THANK YOU. <3

Yay! I'm glad that I could be helpful. :)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

no, seriously. i really want to know this.

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject