For awhile now, people have been sending me invitations to Facebook and Linked In, social media kinds of things. I'm resisiting. Obiously, it took me years to actually start writing a blog more frequently than once a month and sometimes I still fall into my old ways, spending my time with actual people rather than my blog friends.
But this youtube video may have persuaded me. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIFYPQjYhv8
I'm not on Facebook because my kids are. It's a place where they can hang out with their friends and not worry that I'm looking over their shoulders. Of course, I have their passwords, so if I ever wanted to look at their pages, I could. I thought I would leave Facebook to them. Maybe that's a moot point since my mother is one of their friends. What are they going to put on Facebook for their grandmother to see?
My old college roommate found me online and she told me she looked for me on Facebook but couldn't find me. I don't think it was too much of a hardship for her to search "Paulita Kincer" and find me at www.paulitakincer.com
My other thought was, "Am I going to start spending a lot of time updating my Facebook page?" Will this take the place of blogging or am I just going to spend more time on the computer?
The other thing about that youtube video is that it was directed toward advertisers, letting them know that advertising will be people driven. Does that mean that if I'm not on Facebook then I won't be getting as much advertising? I mean, look how highly susceptible I am, thinking about joining Facebook because of this video. Don't you think it would be better for me to avoid advertising altogether?
So, I'm still torn. Other than the fact that "everybody's doing it," is there another reason I should join Facebook? What am I really missing?
6 comments:
You are missing US, lol! 2BZ2BGR8 moved there and we need you! Actually, Facebook IS for your grandmother, as I remind the kids often enough. You want to be Kids Gone Wild, go to My Space. Facebook is where your grandmother or your sixth grade bff or your college astrophysics prof will find you, friend you and with any luck at all, ignore you. You can choose, as Pat has, to not "friend" your kids and then you are just parallel entities on Facebook, destined never to meet or cross. What I find surprising is the kids are happy to "friend" their parents most of the time. Creepy? Maybe. But having me around reminds them of the real truth about being online. Nothing online is private, so, as the attorneys say, govern yourselves accordingly!
I do facebook but it is really a time sucker if you get into it heavily. I think it may be taking the place of blogging eventually. I hope I'm wrong. I do twitter too. Trying to stay up with everything but I don't know why.
I don't think FB has to take much time if you avoid all the silly games and you don't spend too much time looking through your friends pages. I do like to be friends with my kids because I have their updates sent to my phone as a txt and this way I get to read what they're up to when they're out and about. Especially with my oldest going off to college it may be the only way I ever know what he's doing. I don't think of it as spying or checking up on him, it's more because I'm interested in what's going on in his life and this how he most often communicates. I also subscribe to his youtube site, he does some video blogging, and I get updates of his written blogs that he posts on Myspace. I really don't like myspace and I don't usually look at his acct there unless he asks me to read something.
Since this past year was my 20th HS reunion there was a surge of friend requests from old high school friends. It has been fun to see what they're all up to. When all the friends requests initially started coming in I did spend extra time on FB looking at everyone's profiles but now I occasionally see their wall updates and that's it.
I also have my blog automatically sent to facebook so a majority of my blog readers actually read it on FB instead of going to my page. If I was advertising from my page I guess I wouldn't want to do it that way. You can just have a blurb automatically sent to twitter (then automatically sent to FB) that says you have a new blog up and a link (I do that also.) So it is a good way to get your blog out there for people to see.
I also like being able to easily repost news articles onto FB. with just a click it automatically is posted on my wall. Then it's easy for me to go back and find those articles if I want to reference them for some reason.
I do find that I stay in closer contact with my out of town family since we all have gotten on FB than we ever did before. So for that I really like it.
BTW I just posted your blog onto my wall, we'll see if you get anymore hits from there.
It's useful, fun and annoying. Of course, it's your cocktail party so if you find yourself cornered in the bar by an old boyfriend who won't stop talking it's your own fault because you let him in.
SK
My daughter accused me of being a facebook stalker because I don't post anything I just look at what others are doing. She refused to befriend me but her best friend sent me a "friend request" I accepted. I have "met" one of my husbands cousins that no one really talks about on facebook so he and I have struck up a tentaive friendship as the non-country club contingent.
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