I’ve been resisting the urge to try to conceptualise what I like about Facebook, and what makes it different from other social networking media. Instead, I’ve been urging people to give it a try. But Pavlov’s Cat has done a tip top job of capturing its appeal.
An article in The Australian on the weekend quoted American cyberspace social researcher danah boyd at some length on its uses. Unfortunately, there appear to be only a few angles that journos use to write about social networking sites, just as with blogging. In this case it was the old standby, teh dangers of the intertubes, plus online politics (something in the news in Oz at the moment, and the subject of a previous couple of posts here at LP). Boyd1 has a lot of interesting stuff to say, and she’s more patient in dispelling these myths in interviews than perhaps I would be, but I’m not sure about this:
Boyd says there is an older demographic which uses the networking sites for dating. People browse friends’ sites looking for photos of other friends they like the look of. But they don’t have the time to “hang out” like younger users.
I think Pavlov’s Cat, and a number of other bloggers who aren’t the supposedly typical Gen Y youf (including me), would disagree with that! The idea that it’s a vehicle for dating is also an interesting one, and perhaps that’s more so in the States than in Australia (where it’s a relatively recent addition to the social networking menu, and where as far as I’m aware, no study of how it’s used has been done, and it shouldn’t be assumed that use of the same platforms across cultural borders is invariable). I did notice last week when sending some of my Sydney photos posted there to a friend that she mentioned that she couldn’t look at them at work, as the sysadmins had blocked it as a “dating site”.
I’ve found it fun for similar reasons to Dr Cat, and also had the very pleasing experience of catching up with a couple of old friends I’d lost track of, one of whom is visiting ‘Vegas soon. The particular interface of Facebook, I think, facilitates both reviving old ties and wasting time with friends really well, and its ease of use probably substitutes for email or phone contacts, and prompts in turn more personal interaction.
So if we built an LP group on Facebook, would anyone come?
1. Boyd recently wrote an essay about Facebook, Myspace and class divisions, which it appears just about everybody on the intertubes has read. In itself, the reception of this essay across different forms and spaces is interesting, and it hasn’t been in accordance with her intentions, as she discusses in a response to criticisms.
Update: Tim Dunlop blogs facebooking, and there is now (thanks to Rob Corr) an LP Facebook group.
More: Troppo, The Dead Roo and Catallaxy are in on the act too.
Facebook is addictive. The oft quoted figure is that users spend on average 38 minutes a day on facebook, updating, tweeking, sending pokes…
Facebook got something amazingly right, where it’s agreed myspace got something amazingly wrong. It’s a couple of small things, like the individual users control of access to their profile. Or consider the lack of Facebook spammers (so far). And due to small things about the way it operates, you rarely get approached by complete strangers.
And then there is running into all those people I used to know about the place. I wonder if I can get in touch with Shell again…
Myspace wasn’t bad at the time it started off. Rupert paying gazillions for it probably wrecked its future as big corporations discourage creativity, and web 2.0 has moved a long way past it now. It’s coasting on momentum. On the other hand, it was never the best of that generation of social networking media for functionality - livejournal still isn’t bad at all.
You’re spot on about control over access and the way that strangers and spam are discouraged by the network aspect.
Having thought about it a little more, I’m more surprised about Boyd’s comment about dating for that very reason, as older users are much less likely to be part of the enormous college/uni based networks where I’d have thought the “hooking up” would take place, and one would *hope* that there aren’t oodles of forty year old blokes fancying their chances with twenty year old students.
Pirates are so much better than ninjas.
Facebook is absolutely addictive. In the last few weeks I’ve had loads of friends join in and it’s a great way to keep up with that low-level gossip that you sometimes miss out on. It’s reach is huge and I think that’s a lot of it’s attraction. As a communication medium it’s excellent, I just moved into a new sharehouse and one of the first things we all did was to “friend” each other on facebook so that we could use facebook to keep tabs on what we were all up to.
Oh, and vampires are cooler than werewolves.
I love Crackbook. I find I’m using it to keep up with professional contacts a lot. It is definitely the best way to keep up on all the low level gossip.
Non-substantive point: Having just read quite a lot of material about the Wikipedia stoush over her name, I should point out that it’s “danah boyd” not “Danah Boyd”.
Enjoying it so far though I’m probably a light user compared to most. I spend more time using Twitter as my preferred presence updates (especially via my mobile phone when I’m out and about) but Facebooks integration with other apps means my Tweets appear there too so I can use that on the road and be assured that my Facebook friends see my updates. Of course Facebook has a nice mobile version too which I’ve used.
The best thing to date was that it led to me having a terrific Skype video conversation with a certain Libertarian blogger about her new hairstyle…..now that’s just gold to me. Why? Because it’s a contact that I might never have had without it. What’s next? Maybe a Tourettes type conversation with the Birdman.
If you could make an LP group facebook that encapsulated all the things that made LP what it is today then I’m sure it would be great.
Now, let’s see what we’ll need:
(1) gratuitous flirting
(2) chicks with guns, swords, and other deadly stuff
(3) lipsniggery (is she or isn’t she?)
(4) berets
(5) good red wine and excellent whiskey, preferably in large proportions
(6) lively stoushes, preferably not about “teh crusades”
(7) discussions about the awesomeness of Sarah Blasko
(8) discussions that don’t play to the lowest common denominator (hopefully)
(9) …
Quite seriously though, is the blogosphere in such a completely different part of teh intertubes to facebook? That’s the question that I’d really like to know the answer to. I think that a lot of the skills that one picks up out there in the ploggy trenches would be pretty useful for political campaigning on facebook. Though, in all honesty I think those skills would be useful in other places as well.
I can envisage an LP group on facebook that is, well, a facebooked version of LP. It’d be different, but a lot of the personality of the people involved would essentially come through in that medium just as clearly. I don’t know if the same could be said of all blogs, LP is a little different in that a lot of the people that hang out in these parts enjoy a good stoush but also don’t mind cracking wise at the same time. Being playful, and approachable, is a lot of what facebook is all about.
BTW, Lifehacker has a nice list of Facebook apps for productivity.
Is it just me thinking that productivity and Facebook is an oxymoron?
This one is for the Facebookers. Add the Video app.
http://tinyurl.com/2ocuv3
Facebook is much “cleaner” than MySpace, if that makes sense. It appears to be less public than MySpace and also people use their real names and photos (mostly). I’m not sure I’d spend much time on it, but it has been fun seeing what people are up to.
As for the dating thing, well, my “friends” include a cat, a gay man and one of my loveliest and straightest friends. I just think they think anyone over a certain age (err, 25, which I just am over by a little bit) would only be interested in finding lurve. Frankly, the Leonard Cohen Appreciation Society is far more interesting.
I’d be up for a facebook group.
I was just thinking this morning that there’s a killer site waiting to be written - an aggregator site for social networks. Somewhere where you can post a blog (for example) that gets passed on to blogger, LJ, myspace, facebook etc all at once, a way of updating photos all in the same place, a central point for reading/collecting.replying to comments and messages, etc.
Anyway, I find the more social networking sites I’m on, the fewer I pay any real attention to. It’s such a fractured market.
Anyone know of anything that does the above?
I’m the libertarian blogger with big hair (Mark can tell you just how big) Phil’s talking about. As usual Phil has a dose of the modests, too - he helped me find an absolutely perfect pushbike for Oxford; without Facebook it certainly wouldn’t have happened.
Where’s the pictures of you with the big hair, skeptic my dear?
Bugger - Mark was too sick to take any, and I forgot. Although Tanja Stark (Sublimely Gothic Cowgirl) took some last night, and said she was going to put them up on Facebook. I’ll see if she has.
I’m trying to find the time to get onto Facebook - I hadn’t joined because I got the erroneous idea from somewhere that you had to have an .edu email address to join.?!
I had a look at MySpace first when a couple of gen-X and teenage family members joined. The teenagers seemed to abandon it pretty quickly in favour of msn messaging which seems to be the go in our neck of the woods. for the Gen Xer it seemed pretty tragic. She was a single cougar type and her Friends section soon filled up with scary-looking losers from Illinois and Idaho. (We’re in Australia, so.) I thought no more about it until I checked out a couple of friends’ MySpace pages which were dedicated to either bands or solo musical projects. Now, it worked. The “friends” thing worked because it was about influences and mutual appreciation, and all the bits and pieces - videos and sound files - made perfect sense.
So for musicians, I think MySpace is pretty good.I imagine it could work well for visual artists, too.
Although… you could do the same things with blogging software, probably (with a blogroll substituting for the “friends list”).
OK, I give in.
Whats Facebook?
Some new puter thingo on the tubes, right?
Here’s the Larvatus Prodeo Facebook group. Join the hivemind!
Myspace actually makes it very hard to create aesthetically pleasing pages, or indeed pages accessible to users with disabilities.
As best as I can tell, you can’t skin or theme a Facebook profile page, but the baseline design and usability competence is an order of magnitude higher than that demonstrated by Myspace’s trained monkeys.
just joined facebook myself yesterday. looks interesting.
looking at it from a political angle, it will be interesting to see how - or if - these sort of social networking tools foster cross-border communication. I suspect that over time there is a possibility these tools and their successors may socialize individuals into much broader communities that break down the traditional nationalist/religionist group dynamic we see today.
At least, I have my fingers crossed it will.
Update: Tim Dunlop blogs facebooking, and there is now (thanks to Rob Corr) an LP Facebook group.
Check out the tiny peninsula of the land of MySpace on the Map of Online Communities
Troppo is in on the act too.
From the people who brought you the Haneef debacle…
“Kevin Zuccato, head of the Australian High Tech Crime Centre in Canberra, says terrorists can gain training in games such as World of Warcraft in a simulated environment, using weapons that are identical to real-world armaments.”
Wow, the paid lackeys of the ruling class really ARE deranged…hmmm, they better get the SOG team down to the Mind Games store at Chadstone shopping centre quicksmart to break up that Warcarft cell of that’s operating right under our noses!
Nick, right you are. Evidently the lack of caps offended the News Ltd style guide.
I been a member about three weeks. I find facebook easy to get from one blog to another alos hook up with groups quickly..gets a bit addictive & you feel like declaring yourself bankrupt from time to time..
I sooo can’t get my head around the idea. Pictures of my head on the tubes? Bleh.
Will consult closely with Gen Y offspring on the matter. They convinced me to do the MySpace thing but I never use it. Shame. Offspring the first did a splendid job of prettifying it.
You know, vampires may sound cooler than werewolves, but you try having one for a friend. You can’t go to the beach together except at night and even then your friend isn’t going swimming so you’re stuffed if you get into trouble. Your mate won’t come to visit you (even at night) if you’re even vaguely religious or have any mirrors hanging up around your place. If you’re a wog (like me) or similarly culinarily adept, you can forget about having a vampire for a friend. All that garlic just drives them berserk. Then there’s their endless fascination for sneaking into virgins’ bedrooms for a bit of necking. That’s fun the first few times but when it’s all night every night it does get a bit monotonous and predictable. Werewolves on the other hand are really only a bore during the full moon and even that can be fixed through meditation and a good cup of herbal tea. So, I really don’t see why anyone would consider vampires to be cooler than werewolves.
Oh, and vampires never seem to understand the laws of cricket or the offside rule in football.
Demons, Skribe. We’re far more fun and versatile, if sometimes a little, err, possessive.
Sceptic -pics up on my facebook page now - i’ll try and upload them to the LP group too.
If anyone’s interested, you can automatically get a link to your latest blog posts on facebook:
1. Install Alex King’s twitter tools on your wordpress install.
2. Get the twitter app for facebook.
3. Configure Twitter Tools to send an update to a twitter account each time you post, configure the twitter app to display the twitter feed you’ve configured your wordpress install to message.
Bit convoluted, but it works, there is automatically a headline and a link in my facebook profile, and sent to all my friends, whenever I write a new post.
Yeah, but on the downside, it can hurt your relationship when your irritatingly competitive partner decides to go to war over who’s got the most friends…
There is also someone working on a wordpress app for facebook, but at present it only works for wordpress.com blogs.
That’s so myspace.
People might just like her more, crankynick.
Tell her, not me.
Sotherelolzroflmao.
I put lj and facebook in very different categories, though.
lj, for me, is a place where my friends talk about their lives - it’s not quite a serious blogging space (indeed, I really can’t take serious blogs that seriously if I come across them on lj), but it’s more utilitarian than Facebook.
I don’t really see what there is to do on Facebook - it doesn’t seem that functional to me. I’m not sure I’ll get a lot of use out of it after I’ve built my profile and found a bunch of old friends. It’s not not a bad space, but for mine it’s not a very useful space.
“I don’t really see what there is to do on Facebook”
Do?
That’s so RealWorld.
Seems to require rego!
looking at it from a political angle, it will be interesting to see how - or if - these sort of social networking tools foster cross-border communication. I suspect that over time there is a possibility these tools and their successors may socialize individuals into much broader communities that break down the traditional nationalist/religionist group dynamic we see today.
Don’t you think that’s already happening with blogs and forums?
It could be worse, FDB - I could be complaining there’s no easy way to level, and that it’s no fun in PvP…
Jesus - & there I was trying to explain pen pals to the 10 year old the other day. So now we only have social lives when they’re virtually organised? Oy. & oy again.
Catallaxy has set up a group as well, with a picture of Rafe on the home page.
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=17053832016&ref=nf
Or is it Graham Bird?
Work has barred facebook, so there’s no lost productivity amongst my colleagues due to facebook (not that there’s any time for that at the moment, but that’s another story).
Now, I wonder if any scientists have started studying the networks representing all the friendship networks in facebook and similar sites?
There’s a lot of social science research on social networking sites, Sacha. See the blog apophenia written by danah boyd, whom I quote in the post, for an excellent sample:
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/
Cheers Mark.
It’s all such splendid fun - not to mention useful (like my pushbike). Still, must bid the interwebs farewell for now - nasty early start in the morning…
Bon voyage!
I think that’s one way in which Facebook works more like a commons than an agglomeration of individual “my” spaces. So I’m not opposed!
…and that was the day the Ozplogosphere (as Quiggin would insist on calling it) suddenly discovered facebook…
Kieran, if you add the Blogfriends Facebook app, then your profile will display your own most recent blog posts, plus recent blogposts of friends and friends-of-friends. Sounds a bit easier than your convoluted Twitter thing.
http://apps.facebook.com/blogfriends/
This is by far the biggest advantage of Facebook. 90% of Myspace pages are unreadable, due to the awful backgrounds everyone uses to “Pimp Their Profile”.
It’s like 1997 web pages all over again, minus the “Under Construction” animated .gifs.
I don’t know if I’m ready to have my fairly anonymous blog world collide with the likes of Facebook and LinkedIn.
I obviously haven’t spent enough time on Facebook to really get the benefits (are there any?) of it.
Like I said, jen - give it a try. The most benefits, I think, come from getting and keeping in touch with others - the interface makes that a lot easier than other such sites.
Tigtog, for a Facebook newbie, you’ve really taken to it!
I don’t get it.
How could one post the truth about oneself on Facebook or its current equivalent? I guess it is okay for people who have a mask set in concrete with strict boundaries who have already cast the die so to speak on the intertubes and so have no alternative but to continue and are imprisoned by the largely self-imposed limitations on self-revelation, or alternatively, for those happy to construct a persona that is unidentifiable, perhaps more personally revealing, and interesting, yet still not the truth.
Either way, can’t see what is so great, or new.
What’s the “truth about oneself”? Surely that’s contextual?
I meant the truth that no one tells another, that which one does know and doesn’t tell.
If that’s the case, then the inability to tell such a truth doesn’t tell against a social networking site.
Why not?
Maybe it’s because I’ve got a really bad head cold, but I’m not seeing your point. If it’s a truth that one doesn’t tell, and the point of a site where one interacts with others is to tell, then I can’t see it as a demerit for such a site.
I am sure I am not alone in saying I could not tell the truth about many important, nay crucial and fundamental things about myself on something like Facebook, for many and varied reasons, even assuming the multiple choice options cover the basic informational necessities. Which from my viewpoint I doubt they do.
And so, to allow an entry identifying me for others to read, which in its content is so untruthful because of its key omissions, would be so painful and embarrassing for me that I really cannot comprehend why I, or others who must feel the same, would possibly ever contemplate registering my existence on such a site.
Nor do I see any advantage in doing so.
I just don’t see what sorts of truths you mean. In seeking to interact with others in any social context, do you always reveal deep truths about yourself? I doubt it. I’m not understanding what sort of ommissions would make it “untruthful”, “painful” or “embarrassing”.
Well, you’re obviously under no obligation to, but I’m still at somewhat of a loss as to your reservations.
Well, yes, I do often, often involuntarily. So if I couldn’t do it on Facebook or the like, because I don’t agree to a defined or undefined group of people reading such things in such a way, and so I self-censor, then not only why would I bother, but wouldn’t it be something that would be embarrassing and painful for me to do because of the falsity by omission therein?
That’s all fair enough, but remember that Facebook allows you to restrict the information you give and who can see it.
I still have a feeling I’m not seeing your point, but I’ll put that down to diminished cognitive ability on my part due to the flu from hell.
I guess we all reach an equilibrium which defines or shapes what we are prepared to or are comfortable with divulging. At certain points of our lives. But if what we truly need and want to divulge, at a certain point, is not possible, then the ability to do so is rather diminished, and not very tempting, in and of itself.
Yes, but do you support Pirates or Ninjas?
Personally I can’t quite see how Facebook would add more value to my life that I’m not already getting out of cyberspace. And meatspace is always more fun in the long run.
But yes MyFaceBookSpace et al is a fascinating social and cultural phenomenon - especially in how new forms of ettiquete are now emerging, some of which are as subtley inclusive and exculsive as knowing what corner of your calling card to turn down when leaving it at the door of a 19th century townhouse in London or New York’s bon ton barnyards .
Well, yes, I do often, often involuntarily. So if I couldn’t do it on Facebook or the like, because I don’t agree to a defined or undefined group of people reading such things in such a way, and so I self-censor, then not only why would I bother, but wouldn’t it be something that would be embarrassing and painful for me to do because of the falsity by omission therein?
Jinmaro, most of us have been interacting with a site where we have to self-censor, for years– it’s called a workplace!
Apologies to the nice people who have pinged me. I am locked out of Facebook due to (I think) a fault with the change details form, and I’m waiting for the Facebook locksmiths to get around to helping me!
If you think of Facebook as a glorified interactive address book with pics, everything else is a bonus.
I’m more impressed with the blogipelago - it looks kind of like Indonesia.
From the little corner of the Facebookiverse that I’ve seen so far, it’s mainly about being interested in other people’s lives. All the toys are no fun if you’re playing with them by yourself. (Except Traveler IQ, of course.)
And for those of us who aspire to write fiction, it’s an absolute treasure trove of material about people’s daily lives — not ’stolen stories’, just the general texture of how people live, the things they worry about and the things they value.