Face + Book = Thoughts

As I alluded to in the previous post, I have recently joined facebook. My motivation for joining was three-fold. First, I figure that as an internet / web professional I should probably have a better idea of what these social networking phenomena are all about. Second, I recognize that networking could eventually lead to additional opportunities, professional or otherwise. Third, my brother was like "Adam, you so need to get on facebook." Number three was the straw that broke my proverbial camel's back.

Now that I've started playing around with facebook, it's time to share my initial thoughts with the world. I was a big fan of instant messaging in college and loved obsessively checking people's away messages. It wasn't so much that I was stalking people as it was that I liked knowing what everyone was doing. Now that I am slightly removed from college I can't say that I feel the desire to be as constantly aware of other peoples' daily everything. On a certain level, I just don't care. I enjoy checking in on my close friends, but my peripheral friends are peripheral for a reason.

I also have issues with the "more=better" philosophy of social networking sites. They encourage you to expand your networks to the point where it is no longer meaningful for somebody to be your friend. Personally, I believe in quality over quantity. I want it to mean something that a person is my friend and not merely an acquaintance. Unfortunately, there is a negative stigma attached to the rejection of somebody's friend request. I think this is especially true if you actually know the person but are not particularly friends with them. You may even like the person, but is he or she really your friend?

A third, more topical issue I have with the site is the way that groups work. As far as I can tell, the default setting is that you can see the profile of people with whom you share a network. This is not true of people with whom you share a group membership. This means that I can see the profile of most people who are registered in the Israel network, but not the profile of a much more closely related group member. Maybe this wasn't so much of an issue when people were joining facebook and then starting groups for existing facebook members, but now groups should be one of the primary network building tools - especially for people joining later than many members of the group.

I don't mean to be overly negative. Facebook has put me in touch with people who I haven't seen or spoken to in years who I will hopefully reconnect with (as they are currently in Israel) but in general I just don't see the usefulness. I understand the basic human need to be social and I recognize the potential strengths of building a large network of friends, however for me something is still missing. I feel like the true power of these sites remains untapped. They are huge databases that need to be utilized.

I recently peeked into the developers section of facebook and it may represent a way to take advantage of the massive amounts of data that facebook collects. I'll take a closer look in the coming week.

Until then, here is a question or two for all of your fbookers out there: What do you use facebook for and what do you think are its biggest strengths (or short-comings)?