On Facebook...

Several months ago, I finally caved to see what this Facebook thing was all about. For myself, I think the results have been mixed. I definitely went through an initial addiction phase where I was on a lot and amazed about the amount of information out there on people I hadn't seen in 10 years. I was able to “catch up” with them without any effort at all, which was addicting in a voyeuristic sort of way. I even was able to help gather a mini-reunion amongst a few old friends. I really like it as a photo sharing site. It is very user friendly and it's easy to post pics on there for any of your friends to see without worrying about who to email them to. I’m not really a fan of status updates (“Mike is a writing a blog entry…”) and I have never actually posted one yet. I liken them to “reply all” in email, it can serve an important (or at least interesting) function, but it can also get incredibly annoying. Hearing about your kids potty training is really not something I'm interested in hearing about. Part of this is my fault, as I know there are ways on Facebook to customize and filter such that I could eliminate a lot of annoyances and hear from only those who post “good” status updates.

I definitely take advantage of the privacy settings and essentially “lock it up” as restrictive as possible (as they set everything to wide-open by default). It amazes me that the next generation doesn’t understand privacy. Even high school students were quoted in a recent Washington Post article that they didn’t think that school security and local sheriffs should look at students Facebook pages to gather evidence. If you’re dumb enough to 1) post pictures that incriminate you in a crime, and 2) not restrict them so that law enforcement can’t freely look at them, then I have a rock that can keep away tigers that I’d like to sell to you.

Here are a few choice quotes from the Washington Post article:

"I think it's an invasion of the student's privacy," said Sarah Steinberg, 18, a senior at Robinson Secondary

"It's not really [their] business to be looking at students' profiles," said Eleni Gibson, 15, a freshman at Robinson. "Because they might see something that students didn't want them to see."

"It's crazy, the things they put on there," Loudoun County Sheriff Stephen O. Simpson said. "They seem to think they're invisible."

Facebook has been fun and we’ll see where it goes. It’s a nice tool, but it hasn’t taken over my life yet. I have many other ways to communicate with friends, and I’m still using those a lot. In the meantime, don’t take it personally if I don’t accept your friend invitation...