I’ve seen a lot of arguments back and forth lately about the benefits and pitfalls of social networking sites. Mostly the arguments have to do with the benefits of social networking. I’m a member of a number of these sites, including: Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, Technorati, and Twitter. By far my favorite of these is Facebook. Why Facebook?
Differences
When I first signed up for my account I added people that were very close to me only. I still wasn’t sure what I wanted to be posting online, and I was pretty heavy into MySpace at the time (that’s a future post). Also, the availability to the general public was still somewhat in its infancy (2006). I no longer had an active college email account so I couldn’t sign up before. The first thing I noticed was the inability to move specific boxes around. >>Fast Forward 3 years, I have come to see the benefit of that inability.
I think a lot of what I didn’t get was the social part of social networking. Instead of allowing me a lot of time to design and tweak my profile, I was somewhat forced to actually interact with others, on a website.
The Niche
How did this fit into my everyday life? Very easily. I grew up in a small town, and even with that, I didn’t know as much about the people that I’ve known throughout my life as I know now. One of my friends and former co-workers mentions to me when we talk every so often that its like we don’t go without seeing each other because we’re constantly commenting on each others’ statuses, wall posts, etc… I haven’t seen him in person in like 3 months, but picking up the phone and talking to him after that amount of time doesn’t really feel weird. It’s not like we haven’t been communicating, we’ve just been doing it in another way.
That’s the point of social networking though right? Communication with people in another medium besides the historical in person, in writing, on the phone. What’s the difference? In the other mediums they’re mostly 1 to 1 or one-way. Also, the ability to constantly update what you’re doing multiple times throughout the day would be near impossible (not to mention extremely annoying) if you did it via the phone.
[smartads]
Headed back to the store, going to try to remember the eggs this time
In what other medium would that inane message would be annoying, and extremely out of context unless a portion of the conversation had to do specifically with grocery shopping or an ending to the conversation. You certainly wouldn’t send a letter in the mail with only that written on the paper. So why is it ok to throw that message up on Facebook? If you look at the statement itself, there is a lot of personality involved. This person grocery shops, and is somewhat forgetful or doesn’t note take well.
These aren’t the types of messages that necessarily impress people, but they do give an insight to who they are, and combined with wall posts, what their friends say on their wall, and anything else they that they participate. Altogether, you get a really good sense of what a person is. Believe it or not, most people act the same in person that they do on social networking sites involving their RL (real life) friends.
There’s always the part you hate
One of the most annoying things to me are applications that either don’t do something helpful for me, or don’t allow me to share useful non-Facebook information with my friends. There are a TON of these applications out there, and I normally block them. However, I don’t want to block all applications because some of them are actually useful. For example, the plugin I use that only updates my Facebook status with my latest tweet (a Twitter update) when I have ‘#fb’ inside the update somewhere. This allows me to share my information with two groups of people, but not all the time. BTW, it’s called “Selective Twitter Status”. Another one is the updates that I can put on my profile when I digg something. This actually stops me from digging everything because I don’t want my friends to get spammed with all of my updates.
The need for privacy
There’s a certain level of privacy that’s expected online. You don’t necessarily want every person to be able to see the conversations between yourself and your friends, but at the same time, if you get too private, you aren’t really tapping into the social networking part of the website. It is one thing to be cautious, it’s quite another to be over-protective. Although this probably carry’s over into your real-life to a point.
Facebook has a very specific set of privacy settings, you can limit certain people so they cannot see specific information or you can limit anyone outside of your circle of friends from seeing anything at all. You can even limit everyone from viewing anything (but why would you).
So why Facebook?
Personally, it makes me a better friend. I’m a busy person, I don’t normally have time to hang out with my friends on a regular basis, but Facebook allows me to keep in touch with them without interacting personally with them. That way when the next phone call or hang-out happens, I’m not out of the loop, and you’d be amazed at how much there still is to talk about.
–dez
