Facebook is pointless. There, I said it. Like a dog with 5 legs, it’s utterly, absolutely, irresponsibly pointless. There’s already enough shit I get through my email inbox on a daily basis offering dubious genital enhancements and people from fareasterntownthatdoesn’texist-istan asking me to help out their imaginary brother’s education without me getting YET ANOTHER four million emails from Facebook.
This I could put up with, if they were telling me useful things such as new friends invites or that somebody had dropped me a comment, but these are exactly the things I don’t get told about. Instead, I get told that somebody has matched my score on the movie quiz that I never did in the first place, somebody has slapped me with a virtual fish (!) or somebody has just invited me to install the “How sexy are you?” application.
Really, WHO THE FUCK CARES?!
All I want to do is pop the occasional message to tell my friends I’m still sucking oxygen. My life isn’t so inferior and utterly worthless that I feel I have to send someone a bouquet of virtual flowers. However, I’ve increasingly felt that I need Facebook for the very reason explained in my case study below:
Not long back, I sent my friend an email. He didn’t reply, so I sent him another email. This one-sided conversation went on for roughly a week, until I plucked up the courage to climb the next rung of the communication ladder and I tried to ring him. Still no answer. I sent him a text message too, but by now I was almost resigned to the fact that my friend had died a horrible bloody death, and I wasn’t going to get much out of him. So as a last-ditch attempt, I sent him a Facebook message. I kid you not; within the very same hour I sent him the message, I had a reply.
Has our society got the stage now where we can only communicate over Facebook and other social networking sites? Do we just spend 24 hours a day refreshing our profile pages to make sure that nobody has sent us a message?
I give us 5 years. Tops.
Mar 10, 07:07 PM
Kimmy
It took me five years to get msn and i only got that because my boyfriend at the time moved a way away. My friends keep bugging me to get facebook and all this crap but i keep saying no. So maybe your 5 year assessment is correct in the sense that it will take that long to break me. I won’t cave in and get facebook in the foreseeable future. But hey, by the time i do cave in, there will be some new fad that people are nagging me to join so i’ll join the “past it” facebook just to pacify them. I have it all worked out! HEHE.
Mar 10, 10:31 PM
Darfuria
Facebook, I thought, was going to be the socnet website that took the lead. When it first hit the world by surprise, it was fantastic. Develoiped in PHP and MySQL, as you know, it was a nice lightweight web site that ran smoothly, unlike MySpace, which is cluttered to fuck. I was glad that users weren’t given the ability to edit their profile templates, so the site looked clean throughout.
Then disaster struck when they released their API to the public, allowing all sorts of applications to be created. Some of them, I have to admit, are fantastic. I have one which updates my Facebook profile with my recent blog posts, and another which displays my Picasa gallery. However, as I ranted about in my blog, I couldn’t give a flying fuck about STUPID FUCKING HATCHING KTITENS, and that is what ruined Facebook for me.
I hate to admit it, but I actually met my girlfriend on MySpace 6 months ago. We live in the same city. A few weeks ago I wanted to delete my MySpace profile and she actually got angry and upset, and shouted at me, because she said that me having a profile so that I can be #1 in her top friends is important to her.
I don’t really want to get anymore involved with social networking websites, but if I don’t, practically every single person I know online hassles me constantly until I go ahead and make a profile. People have even made profiles FOR me in the past.
It’s terrible.
Mar 11, 06:42 PM
Rob
PAH! from the new found studenty type Rob.
WHAT A WASTE OF TIME! from the mancunian educated digger Rob.
Ive gone from half to two readers, and both are right. Its definetly a student thing, what with all the quizzes etc. and no its not going to make sense, to people who have jobs, mortgages, rent bills and proper 3D real world lives. but for student, who want nothing more than to be labeled a ‘Emo’ or a ‘Rocker’ or whatever, its perfect.
so love it or loathe it much like marmite, Facebook is merely a fad, like myspace pokemon and yoyo’s before it, it will soon end up on the back shelf at OXFAM shops accross the world.
Mar 13, 01:35 PM
James
Even though now they’ve opened up their API which has lead to any man and his dog making Facebook applications, I still love it. Call it a guilty pleasure but I find it kind of interesting from a web design point of view. Careful creation of groups and events can drive traffic to websites when you’re trying to promote something. Plus it must be one of the best ways of reaching 18-25 year olds on the web.
Instead of hating it, learn to love it is a tool or platform for your own personal gain.
