Donald Noble's Website

Simon has just posted an interesting rantpost on why he is not on Facebook, or indeed on any of the multitude of social networking sites that seem to be springing up at the rate of one a week. He cites that fact that networking for the sake of it seems inherently wrong. Why not actually speak to your friends, be it in person, by phone, or by instant messanger.

Annoying he is right, well, almost.

Some people use facebook as a poor man’s substitute for flickr (disclaimer: other photo sharing sites are available) to share their photos online. So you need an account to keep up with these people.

Apart from that, I am becoming disenchanted with Farcebook. I have stopped adding people as ‘friends’ because either I know what these people are doing before they update their status on Facebook, or, quite frankly, I don’t really care.

When I joined, I saw Facebook as something of a free Friends Reunited⁽¹⁾, I added a few old school/uni mates as friends, but I can’t say that I’ve kept in touch more now than before. Farcebook appears to have become the new MySpace, in the see how many “friends” you can collect popularity contest. (Aside: Is it wrong to cull people as friends on Facebook if you no longer speak to them?)

Do I then need sites like Facebook? Annoying the answer seems to be yes. Human nature is to be social, to want to know what is going on, and so we are drawn to these sites. But my status is currently “Donald is bored of farcebook.” and long may it continue, I do try and live a real life too!
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1. Like Simon, I have a blog, and if people want to get in touch with me a quick search will bring me up near the top.

This entry was posted on Sunday 23rd September 2007 in Blog, Computers and tagged Computers, facebook, internet, networking, pointless, rant, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.