Facebook

I now have 65 facebook friends, almost halfway to Dunbar's number (150 for the non-link followers). Who knew I knew this many people on-line? Much more successful for me than Friendster ever was. Or MySpace (Flashing unicorns?! Who thinks flashing unicorns is a good idea?! It's like web design in 1996! And your music! I don't want to listen to this damn song!).

I've added people (in or fresh out of college) with 500+ friends. Guess they never heard of Dunbar.

It's a useful way to keep in touch with people, I have to say. I can read my news feed and see what people are up to, status-wise (oh crap, isn't that what twitter is?! As longs as it's relationship-based, it seems to make sense) and 'interaction with other friends'-wise. I've noticed a generation gap, though. My college-era friends aren't joining (or perhaps all conspired to ignore my friend requests!!!), and the people I keep in touch with on-line around my age tend to do so via email rather than facebook.

That might be the thing: I want to have a single point of contact, and I default to my Google/Gmail account for that. A slightly different generation is viewing their facebook account as the center of their on-line identities. It's where their pictures, video, relationships, and public interactions are stored. OK, that said, it was an invite from my mother which finally got me on facebook...

My annoyances. :-)

• Email notifications are purposefully obtuse. What I mean is, if someone sends me a facebook message, I get an email notification (which I've purposefully turned on) of that fact. But I don't get the content of the message! I can understand maybe limiting it to the first 100 characters (if they want to limit it), but following a link to read a "me too" note is a pain in the butt.
• Friend sorting. I don't mean I want to sort my friends by importance, but I do want the option of sorting them by other means. Order they joined facebook? Order that we became facebook friends? How about number of "mutual friends" which would provide me with a list of the people I'm most connected to socially? How about finding people in my home network (Orange County, CA), who I share the most mutual friends with, but who aren't currently my friend?!
• Third party applications. Well, I already blogged about that. I don't use any. No pink ribbon. No super-poke. No jedi/ninja/clown/sith/pirate/mime battles. I want my personal information shared with as few people as possible.
• It's not Google. I'm annoyed that Google can't get it together enough to integrate their numerous services in a way that lets me do all this in Google instead of facebook.
  

It's very viral. I think I found several of the Atomic swing team members on facebook, and within a matter of weeks, everyone was on, everyone was friended and we had our own Group. Probably the group I have the most connections with. The Youngish Quakers are lagging far, far behind.