NOTE: All names except for my name have been changed to protect their identity, not that anyone would really care about their identity anyway even if I didn’t cloak them.

Gasp! Douglas is actually using and reviewing a social networking website! Oh my gosh! People predicted that this would never happen until hell froze over, Paris Hilton bought FOX News, and deep-fried pickle hearts started tasting like polish sausages! But this past summer, the tech world was hit by two big storms. The first one was, of course, the iPhone, but the second one was the opening of Facebook’s new Apps API. So this summer I decided, what the heck, I’d see what all of the fuss was about. And so, for this, the thirty-fifth and very last review of my Webmacster87.info Month of Reviews, I’m going to write this review differently than I have all of the past thirty-four reviews: by telling a story. Here is the story of my experiences with Facebook.

I’m much more enlightened now, but when I signed up for Facebook about two months ago, I really didn’t have a very good idea of how social networking works. Larry had invited me to Virb back when that was still an invite-only site, but I hadn’t really figured out how it worked, and after the horrible experience that I had with VirbTunes, I kind of ditched it. Beyond that, the only other things that I had really heard about social networking came from Facebook’s rival site MySpace–mostly stories of horrible design and of online predators waiting to pounce on unsuspecting teenagers (Dateline NBC’s “To Catch a Predator,” anyone?).

It was with these spooky thoughts in mind that I decided to go ahead. I held my breath and registered on Facebook–and was surprised to see it asking me about which high school I attended, and which year I would graduate, and stuff like that. But okay, I did all that, and it put me in the network for Aragon High School. I congratulated myself on my achievement, and since I was in the middle of working on Webmacster87.info 5 anyway, decided to close up Facebook, try it out some more later, and get to my work.

BAM! In came e-mail after e-mail after e-mail–I’m surprised that Mail didn’t start classifying this things as junk! All these e-mails come in from Facebook from friends at school whom I hadn’t seen in a month (and wasn’t expecting to see for another month and a half) who were adding me as friends, and writing on my wall (what the heck is that?), and doing all this weird stuff. And so I’m like, okay, okay, friend friend friend friend, since after all, it’s the Web 2.0, so it’s GOT to have friend features, right? But then I go to Facebook’s home page, and I get this “News Feed” thing showing me stuff that my friends are doing. And most of it’s stuff I don’t care about. Even when I look at it as I’m writing this review, I get “Sanderson Whatnot added the Naughty Gifts application,” and “James Jones and Julia Johnderson are now friends,” and “Jeeka Mandi wrote on Almondo Jefferson’s wall.” WHY THE HECK SHOULD I CARE ABOUT ANY OF THESE?

Of course, I’ve got people writing on my “wall” (stupid name, in my opinion), so I guess I’d better write back. And then friends are inviting me into groups, and messaging me (I liked the one that asked me what the heck I was doing on Facebook). But then I ended up having someone “poke” me, which just about made me fall out of my chair. At least, until I found out that there’s apparently an application called SuperPoke!, which inspired the name of the episode for PreviewCast #034. Since then, I’ve been invited to be a vampire, warewolf, and all of this other crazy stuff which I was just content to completely ignore. Call me crazy, but that’s not my idea of social networking. That’s my idea of someone who needs a psychiatrist. Immediately.

Okay, not to suggest that any of my friends at school need psychiatric help, I just think that those aspects of Facebook seem weird.

Still, Facebook’s apps platform does allow me to integrate a number of the Web 2.0 services that I use and love onto my Facebook profile, such as Digg, Flickr, Last.fm, Twitter, Upcoming, Wakoopa, and even WordPress.com. There are probably more that I’m not using, mostly because I’m not exactly making Facebook my primary method for putting myself “out there” on the web.

However, Facebook actually did save my bacon this summer. During this summer I lost my AP US History summer assignment (I know, I stink). Thanks to Facebook, I was able to get ahold of the contact information of a number of my classmates, and torture ask them for a copy of the assignment so that I wouldn’t get caught begging my History teacher for mercy on the first day of school.

In conclusion, my first experiences with Facebook have been weird, rough, and interesting to say the least. When I registered, I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect, and I still don’t think that I’ve completely figured out the site. However, I have found it to be useful for keeping in touch with the friends that I see at school (as opposed to the friends whom I usually talk with over IM from afar), and for driving them towards reading this blog. It definitely will not become overly used by myself, nor will it replace Webmacster87.info, and it definitely will not prompt me to use MySpace (or to even visit the site, which I have never done yet in my life and never intend to). However, it’s yet another place now which can enjoy the identity of webmacster87 here on the internets.

Final Rating:

Tags: article, Facebook, friends, network, Personal, rants, review, social networking, Web 2.0