Saturday, January 3, 2009

The Saturday Seven: Vexations About Facebook

As if I don't spend enough time with my laptop fiddling with Blogger. I recently joined Facebook and Twitter just because "everyone's doing it". Being over 21, I don't completely understand it yet, but I'm starting to catch on. A year or two ago I joined MySpace and since I'm over 14 I definitely never got it. Facebook seems to be fairly user-friendly and doesn't take long to learn the basics. That being said, there are some things that I still mystify me and other things that drive me crazy. This was the inspiration for another scintillating edition of the Saturday Seven: Vexations About Facebook. It is a fascinating bit of programming, because it uses algorithms to link up people or find friends. Your interests, hobbies, where you went to school, work, etc all give Facebook clues about who you are. It can be a really fun site to use. What some people fail to remember is that nearly everything you type or upload is visible to everyone, or at least your friends and network, depending on how you set it up. I've seen people have "private" online conversations with someone else not realizing that their entire network of friends was reading along about "how that Suzie So and So is a conniving beyotch". Oh my. So take note, you have to select the "wall to wall" option for those truly private conversations. Anyway, onto my Saturday Seven: Vexations About Facebook:
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#1 Content is Written in Stone: There are lots of things that once added cannot be edited, only deleted. For example: any comments you make, any status updates, comments on walls, or comments about someone else's photos.
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#2 Friend Finder: Facebook looks at your mutual friends and suggests all sorts of people you know, or should know. 90% of the time I have no idea who those people are.
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#3 Status Updates: The never-ending flow of updates about people. Foolish things people post like- "I've just started the laundry" suddenly becomes news. It's like a news network for non-news. Sometimes the updates get overwhelming...being constantly inundated all kinds of junk. Fortunately there is a feature to "see less about so and so" which will reduce the amount of junk mail that appears on my wall.
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#4 Sponsor Ads: These annoy me and are NEVER related. I use their feedback box on the ads and use the drop down option "I find it offensive" in the hopes they will someday think I am a prude and give up.
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#5 Social Applications & Groups: I'm constantly blocking all kinds of applications that are meaningless to me. I don't have time to comb my hair, let alone spend hours online chatting about Shaun Cassidy's haircut in the 70's
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#6 Virtual Gifts & Applications like that: I never accept them, I don't understand them and I'm bored by them. "So and so passed you a drink" or "So and So is giving you flowers". What's the point? (I sound cranky here).
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#7 Photo Limitations: For some reason Facebook has a hard limit of sixty photos per gallery. If you have vacation photos to upload that becomes a problem. I have trouble uploading more than 10 at once. So it is time-consuming. I prefer flickr, snapfish or one of the other online photo share sites.
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Well that's my list. What about you? What do you think about Facebook? Any other things annoy you that you'd like to share? Go ahead, leave a comment, this is the first Saturday Seven of 2009 so splurge!

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