4 Responses to “Facebook the Transformers of Social Networking”

• 1
  Dannie Jost
  June 14th, 2007 22:39

  Uhm… I am puzzled. I can safely confess to not getting the said power or potential of facebook. It is there, I just do not feel it, at least not yet. For the casual exchange with the people whom I know face to face I use either jaiku or (god forbid) yahoo on Adium.

  Some of these appliances (ok, applications) remain with great potential, but that is it. iChat is for me one of those too… too few of the people whom I interact with and know have the iChat client as this is a mac only thing, thus it becomes rather impractical for me as a lot of the wonderful people in my world are not apple users.

  Facebook is another story, I am just wondering what it is that I do not get about it, or what it is that makes me uncomfortable about it.
• 2
  minger
  June 15th, 2007 00:29

  Dannie, Facebook is the natural evolution of MySpace. If you don’t feel the need for MySpace, you will not feel the for Facebook either. Both are environments for a mix of social interaction — to play with your friends or to make new friends — and to serve as a medium for communication. Some people want the communication tool and not the playground. Not to pick on Stowe Boyd, but to use him to illustrate, http://myspace.com/stoweboyd has virtually no activity, just a picture of himself and two friends (one of them is Tom), and hasn’t been logged in since 2006/01/08. Stowe has no need of the MySpace playground yet it claims 60,000,000+ accounts in the United States. Clearly for an older elite blogger — no insult intended — the value proposition is not the same as it is for someone younger, never married, looking to establish reputation and mingle. But an expert commentator on social interaction must be flexible enough to understand the reality tunnels of mass movements, especially when they don’t subscribe to it. To do otherwise would be like watching the rise of the Third Reich or the introduction of the automobile and dismissing their significance with “I don’t get it, I don’t live that way.”
• 3
  Dannie Jost
  June 15th, 2007 13:22

  OMG! I think I got it! Thank you. Your argument does make sense to me, and it goes along with my own experience on Facebook although I do not spend much time in it, and most of the contacts that I have there are people whom I know offline, you being one of the few exceptions, if not the only one.

  I certainly could not get into the space of “mySpace” even when a face-to-face friend sent me an invitation to it, I could not bring it over me to even create an account. At least Stowe who is 3 years older than I, got over that hurdle! However I got it that kids of all ages on the dating scene and college age might find it useful.

  Then it could be a bit of a personal preference of mine. I do not like social applications that are very sticky and where people get all involved with each other. Funny enough, I do need my-own-space!
• 4
  minger
  June 15th, 2007 13:52

  I’m happy to be your exception

  I suppose we are all performers and the issue is to pick the best channels to convey our acts, given time constraints and personal biases. Heavy bloggers pour their energy into blogs; musicians into recordings or performances, etc.

  For the younger audience, MySpace and Facebook have become substitutes for email among friends. Instead of using hotmail, gmail, aol, or outlook, they use MySpace or Facebook. So those social platforms have multiple pulls on youthful energies. (The idea is a bit alien to me but I’ve started doing it on Facebook.)

  I understand the feeling of “the hurdle.” I was a big fan of MySpace and when a friend tried to get me to join Facebook my reaction was “this is SO not for me — I am not in college!” It wasn’t until later when the phenomena became to irresistible and more mainstream did I join in. As did you

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