I held off as long as I could. Ignored the pressure. I even turned to LinkedIn for my networking needs. And I’ve networked quite a bit, though ultimately to little effect. No, the facts were clear, the conclusion inescapable: Facebook is where it’s at.
So I got myself a little place over there and invited some friends over. Recent friends, old friends, even some friends so ancient I had to send a message with my invitation to explain the discrepancy between my current name and the one by which they knew me.
And now I know who is watching what on TV and what everybody I ever knew had for dinner. Oh brave new world.
Ok, I don’t really get Facebook. I get Xanga. You write stuff, people read it. If they feel inspired to do so, they comment upon it. If you write something worth reading, people come back. Totally get that.
But Facebook is like a gigantic online coffee shop and people you know wander in and out constantly and tell you, or you overhear, little snippets of their lives. Which leads to snippets of other people’s lives, people you don’t know who didn’t write something specifically for strangers to read, but there you are reading it anyway because they wrote it on your friend’s “wall,” and it shows up on your home page. And you find out who is meeting for drinks later and who is feeling under the weather and… oh wait, Xanga is like that too, but not so aggressively. You have to work at your voyeurism on Xanga. On Facebook it all shows up in front of you whether you are looking for it or not.
What I haven’t figured out yet is whether one can blog on Facebook, or hook it to Xanga in some way. Not sure I would want to, just want to know what the options are. But blogging doesn’t seem to be the point over there.
I must admit I have an ulterior motive in wading through the web 2.0 waters to that particular island. Marketing. Specifically, the agency I work for has a big whoop-dee-doo fundraising event coming up, and I want to use the power of the internet to make sure that everyone who has had the misfortune of meeting me knows all about it. It seems that won’t be hard, since all of my Facebook friends will hear me whining about the unbelievable headache that is event planning and preparation. Y’all will probably hear about it too. Sorry about that.
This has been a confused and disjointed piece so far, which just shows you how confusing and disjointing I am finding this experience. Don’t worry, Xanga, I’ll keep coming home at night, even if I’ve been visiting that other site.
Transvestite Rabbit 