Facebook vs Email
The vortex of Facebook junkies around me have sucked me into the Facebook abyss as well. My wife’s family started it, but now a lot of people I know are using it. I just found out that in Ottawa, approximately 1 in 10 people is using Facebook.
Email has been becoming increasingly useless. So have blog comments. Almost any form of open communication is being co-opted by spammers. Even private messages in World of Warcraft have been taken over; it’s a rare session now when I log in and don’t have gold farmer spam waiting for me in my in-game inbox.
Whitelist email works, but maintaining your list is a pain. People move, change jobs, change ISPs, and get new email addresses. One of the reasons Facebook works so well is that you’re not whitelisting an email address or URL or some technical way of contacting someone; you’re whitelisting a person.
That person maintains their own information, and Facebook maintains the relationship between you and them.
I find the communication I have with friends on Facebook is generally easier to initiate and more engaging than most email, because it’s surrounded in context. If someone in my family posts a photo, they’re not just sending me pictures; they’re posting photos and Facebook is telling me (via my home page) that they’ve done it; I can look at them if I like, and post comments on them. A lot of ad-hoc conversations happen around photos this way.
There’s a lot of the eBay effect in Facebook: You really only want to belong to one social networking site, and that’s the one with most of your friends on it. Facebook has achieved critical mass, and so will likely dominate for the next few years.
What I want in Facebook is a way to create circles of friends and restrict access based on that. For example, people I might become friends with someone through the blog, but does that mean I want them to see my entire friends list? Probably not. But with Facebook, it’s all or nothing.
April 29th, 2007 at 1:09 pm
Dude, we should link up on Facebook :) The acid test of friendship :) Seriously though, while I agree with your thoughts on email and spam, I find communicating through Facebbok a bit of a pain. Firstly, I get emails from Facebook saying I have messages waiting, which is like adding another redundant layer to my communication routine; log into Hotmail, check mail, then log into Facebook & check more mail. I find that kind of annoying. And despite having fun with my Sharepoint “dating” website at wrok, I find myself disinclined to enmesh myself into Facebook. It just seems like lots of trouble. I mean, geez, it’s hard enough to run my real social life as it is, I don’t think I want the burden of a virtual social life to manage too.
We can talk more about it when you get back :)
June 29th, 2009 at 10:59 am
You can change Facebook settings so that you don’t get sent notifications to your email – then you dont end up with loads of emails just from Facebook – I know what you mean it can be annoying but just un tick a couple of boxes and it’s so much better.
And also it’s not really a virtual social life – it is a way of running your ‘real’ social life. Its so much easier to send someone a quick message because you only need their name. Also it’s free but you could just text a friend if you had something really urgent. When would you ever email a friend just see how they are/what they got up to at the weekend – it would just seem a bit wierd to me…that’s what facebook is for and I think its really good. I see where you are coming from though.