OK, so despite telling a friend yesterday that I was trying to cut down on ‘social networks’, I’ve been persuaded that Facebook is now a socially acceptable forum even for people over 20. So here’s my shiny new profile.
As with LinkedIn, though, I’m going to restrict my list of contacts to people I’ve actually met. Or at least spoken to on the phone…
Let’s see how it goes.
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Facebook started with university students, but they’ve widened their reach to everyone now (and apparently turned down a $1bn offer from Yahoo). Thankfully, you can’t pimp your page, unlike MySpace (which I once had the misfortune to visit) although they’ve added “applications” recently which might change this.
I’ve been on Facebook since January and now have over 100 friends (like you, people I’ve met, work colleagues, friends, etc) but I’m now starting to feel like I should be able to separate these into “better friends” and “acquaintances”, since I don’t know if I want everyone being able to see all my photos, etc. The facebook model does allow a lot of tweaking of privacy settings, but they don’t seem to have introduced “groups” yet, just “networks” based on your university (and now for companies and organisations, etc).
Anyway, expect to waste a fair bit of time on the site. It’s an interesting social experiment, although I still have privacy concerns. Bill Thompson’s been blogging about facebook here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6764751.stm and facebook even got a mention in last Sunday’s sermon at church! So it seems they’re almost at critical mass… I guess Yahoo or Google will be back with an even bigger $$$$ billions offer in due course.