I caved.

I joined Facebook.

I initially tried to view FB as a blog, since that has been my main online passion the last few years.   Facebook can serve that role, if you’re a person not particularly interested in having a blog.   It allows you blog-like features such as posting and connecting to other posters, streaming updates, and links, but only within the Facebook application.   Comments all stay in FB and not to your blog, RSS feeds from someone’s “Notes” in FB all stay in FB, even if the Notes stream originated from an external blog. Size, presentation, and type of content are limited, customization seems restricted.   Anything I can do in a web page I can do in my blog – flash, javascript, php, but FB stripped down everything to one format and one font.     It does not lend itself to creating an environment by color, background, or layout. You have, as best I can tell no access to themes or CSS. It also doesn’t seem to be well-suited for writing a lot, as the editor is very simple. Perhaps these features can be customized by some of the many Facebook applications, but if you are going to that level of detail, you might as well have a blog and access to the source.     These are part of what I like most about my blog, that I can create my own space that is visually and behaviorally exactly what I want.     FB is simply not suited to play the role of Blog engine well.   It does handle photo albums easily, and would take traffic and size off my blog, likely requiring the use of a plugin for WordPress.   Whether or not that is better than a neutral 3rd-party site like Picasa will be something I will evaluate further. I quickly removed my stream from chollaball.net into my FB Wall. It might have been viewed more easily by people who don’t frequent my blog, but it was not the view I wanted them to experience.

Once I got beyond judging FB like WordPress or Blogger, I was able to evaluate it for what it does particularly well, and that of course is social networking.   It took about a week to get my head wrapped around this concept, since its like email or a message board in ways that initially makes it seem redundant.   Adding friends one-by-one is annoying.   Not easily seeing a long history is annoying.     But the way it takes these same building blocks and supercharges them is amazing.     Its like having conversations with all your friends, but better.   Its dynamic in the way email is not, self-selecting in the way a message board is not, and of more substance in the way twitter is not.   Put them all together and it blows these single experiences away.   I’ve found that in a short period of time I’ve become better friends with my existing friends who use FB, have funner and more satisfying conversations, and much more lively chatter.   I’ve reconnected with several old friends, and because each of us can package our image and does not face the awkwardness of meeting up live in a finite and immediate setting, it allows you to be much more at ease.   25% of friendship is common interests, 75% is convenience and habit.   Facebook allows you to focus on the 25% and make of the 75% exactly what you choose.

Aside from good conversations and chatter with people I see and talk to regularly, I’ve noticed a couple interesting uses for FB.   Blog lite – for folks who want to share, but not write too much or go too crazy with a more complex program, FB is a wonderful lightweight blog.   For some of my friends, its FB or silence, and I like to hear what they are saying.   High School reunions – totally remove the Gross Pointe Blank weirdness, and get to view your peers as adults from a reasonable perspective.   Political movements – the matching and recommendations could spread like wildfire.   I heard one site bashing Dick Cheney had over 50,000 friends in a single day.   Viral marketing – Lance Armstrong has combined FB with his livestrong.com site and twitter updates to tap into the incredible depth of passion and emotion that thousands of individuals have for him.   Lance’s appeal defies a niche, its personal, and he uses it masterfully for his anti-cancer campaign.

On a techy level, FB is very cool in its aggressive   matching system that latches onto anything about you that it can, and then constantly updates based on the patterns you match.     I wish I knew more about it, and working there would be the bleeding edge in “If You Like This, You’ll Love That” algorithms.   Within about 2 days, most of the people I talk to regularly by email and groups and blogs were my friends or suggested to be my friends.   And so were their friends, and their friends’ friends, and here is where it gets kinda creepy.     You can’t slip quietly into Facebook, as everyone who has ever been connected to you knows about it.   So people you might want to just casually associate with must become your friends, or be cast into purgatory knowing full well how they got there.   Gradations of friends is hardly better – its not that your info should be private, its that your access should be.   I don’t really want to talk to people that I don’t normally talk to.

In some cases the lack of privacy is just plain bad.   I can see all of Beckie’s friends, comments and activity.   She can see mine.   Relationships need privacy to be healthy.

The privacy questions get bigger and heavier when you realize that all your info…every post, every picture, every connection…is stored on Facebook’s servers.   An outstanding article in the recent Wired talked about FB’s future, how they strive to be the next Google, and the privacy concerns surrounding it all.   I’m not worried, exactly, but at the end of the day you always always have to remember that you are on the internet and anything you write is not longer your own.   Its harder to do the more comfortable you are.   Facebook lets you package yourself, best to do it smartly.