Trying Not to Lose Face

I just signed up to see. Inevitably, Henry is my only friend. And I’ve only met him once.

I resisted setting up an account because I did not want to intrude on whatever dubious teenage communications my son was involved in on Facebook, and I wanted to avoid the creepy factor Jacob mentions (being well beyond undergrad age). If there is one thing worse than being unpopular it is being unpopular and creepy. It turns out that one thing Facebook is quite good at is preserving privacy, so I needn’t have worried – or at least, not about intruding.

After setting up an account I decided no one really needed to see my date of birth, views on politics, etc, so I unchecked the Marriage button. My few friends then got notified that I am no longer married. There are potential dangers here…

I actually joined because I’m communications officer for our NDP riding association (that’s constituency association to non-Canadians) and while I’m posting announcements on our web site I might as well do so to the facebook crowd too.

I’m quite impressed with facebook. Nevertheless, now I have joined I am sure it is well on its way to being last year’s thing.

And yes, I am a Friend Of Henry.

I opened up a Facebook page about a year ago. Mostly because I teach in college and it seems to be a big part of student life, so I wanted to understand what it was. I think I still don’t really understand, to tell the truth. For me, the “news feed” is actually the point — I have about 40 “friends,” many of whom are people I don’t talk to at all regularly, and it’s an interesting moment’s diversion to check the page and see what they describe themselves as doing. But I’d think this feature would be annoying or at least useless for people who have hundreds of friends; is it?

My reasons were the same as #5, to understand what my students are talking about and experiencing. Since then, many of my colleagues, friends, and relatives (including my mom!) have joined. The best part is reminding me when various birthdays are coming up.

I joined several years back to help pump up my young cousin’s friend list (he was just starting his undergrad). I peeked back in this year after seeing all the media mentions and I’m still one of a very few faculty members at my institution who’re on the site. Now I check in daily and have gotten in touch with several old friends so I think the site’s fulfilling some of its promises.

I joined two years back at the prodding of my undergrad students. I maintain a very minimal presence. The whole “grad student in an undergrad world” thing seemed a bit odd at first, but as the facebook OGs grow up and become grad students themselves things seem to be leveling out. Unfortunately I still cannot explain to anyone why facebook is somehow better for communicating with friends via email, but I’m not going to insist otherwise lest I sound like someone advocating the phone or conventional letterwriting over email.

I just got invited to, and joined, a work-oriented thing called LinkedIn. The person who invited me also invited lots of others in my general blog circle, but I have no idea if anything will come of this.

And to answer Henry’s original question: I think a major tipping point for Facebook (in addition to expanding past college students) was when they opened up their API allowing outside developers to create features for it. This has really taken off in the last month or so. (See Applications on Facebook.)

Regarding LinkedIn, it is quite different and shouldn’t be confused with Facebook. Very different functionalities, especially for non-paying members. Not much functionality would be a more direct way of putting that actually.

Evidently, I have Facebook and MySpace accounts, though I did not create either of them. One of my friends (I’m still not sure which) decided to create them for me, and to populate them with accurate data.

I suppose I could take over the accounts, but as unsettling as it is, I think it’s much more convenient to have someone else keep my data up-to-date than to do it myself.

A lot of Facebook wall posts are witty, or intended to be witty, comments on a friend’s doings, pictures, etc. In an e-mail, they go just to your friend; on Facebook they can be read by everyone in your social circle. It’s the difference between making a joke to an audience of one and to a whole interested group. Isn’t it understandable that some prefer the latter? I suspect it goes with what I think is the tendency of undergrads and even grad students these days to socialize, i.e. go out to bars, clubs, etc. in much larger groups than my generation did (yikes!) decades ago. And am I right that the normal accepted length for a Facebook wall post is shorter than for an e-mail, which in turn is shorter than for an old-fashioned letter?

I can’t remember why I joined Facebook a couple of months ago… I think it was just on a whim, no invitation. But then I found a bunch of my friends on there anyways, and a lot of them also had joined recently.

I joined to better associate faces with names among my students. A year ago I had one or two friends – in the last few months it has exploded with people I went to high school and undergrad with. It’s nice to touch base with people you haven’t seen in 10 years…or in the case of two friends from primary school that I haven’t seen in 25 years.

But I think Jorge Cham has it best – Facebook is a tool for Notworking.

Henry, designating oneself as a tipping point seems a bit like writing one’s own Wikipedia entry.

Joined last week at the behest of my son (and now my “friend”) who is travelling around the world and posting his photos, as he goes, to Facebook. Otherwise the world of Facebook seems a totally alien one, in which everyone is at least a generation younger than I.

I thought the big tipping-point phenomenon was when they allowed you to import your contacts from your webmail programs. That day I got added by two friends from other grad schools that I’ve met at conferences, and realized they had probably imported their contact list, so I figured I should do the same. They give you a choice about whether to invite your non-facebook friends on, and I bet some small number of people accidentally invite everyone that way. I know several very non-facebook type people added me just after that point, so that was my guess.

As to why Facebook is more attractive than keeping up with friends by email, it’s like the text message comparison to phone calls: a more non-committal, low investment mode of communication. You can ‘keep up’ with friends from many parts and periods of your life without having to maintain a continuous conversation with them. Quite handy, really.

26 – That’s a bit mean-spirited. Henry didn’t designate himself as tipping point. He observed that many parts of his varied social network were adopting Facebook at around the same time, and thought this was a tipping phenomenon.

My comment at #26 was intended only as a gentle poke; I thought Henry’s reaction was cute.

In deference to #36, I suppose I should have written, “Henry, designating one’s circle of friends as a tipping point seems a bit like writing one’s own Wikipedia entry.”

After thinking MySpace was ‘kewl’ (as I had plenty of friends on it), I then became alerted to Facebook which I now quite enjoy. It is surprising how few of us over 30 have joined…and how many of our undergraduates are on. Just look out for ‘Appreciation Societies’ of colleagues that, well, aren’t about appreciation…

When I search for the Crooked Timber group on Facebook I get “I’ve got nothing for you”. Am I being dumb, or is it a closed group I’m not allowed to join?

Same for me, Danbye and Katherine. Also, Facebook seems to be very limited for those of us without academic e-mail addresses who don’t work for large companies, since it appears you can’t search for people who aren’t in your networks. But perhaps I’m missing something.

Guess I should have refreshed the page before posting, thanks henry!

KC – It’s up to people to designate privacy settings as to whether they show up on searches performed by people outside of their networks. Plenty of people have found me who are not in any of my organizationally-based networks. I think it’s the default that people can find you so if doesn’t require that people have the know-how to change privacy settings. I suspect what’s going on in your case is that perhaps many people in your networks simply haven’t signed up (yet?).

Thanks, Eszter. I was confused by the interface, which says it searches “My Network and Friends” but in fact seems to search more than that. I’ll have to see if I can unearth my never-used and otherwise pointless alumni e-mail addresses so I can join my university networks.

The groups are usually supposed to be funny, though some serve actual purposes. For example, I’m in a group for people doing an international internship next year. Our program gives us zero info, so as a group we collectively try to figure out what’s going on. The group can be universal, so all the assistants from the US, Canada, UK, Australia, etc are on there, and I suppose this sort of community wouldn’t have been as successful sans facebook. But again, most of the groups are just a way of describing your interests/etc outside of the personal info field. In fact, because the groups you join tell something about your personality, many students leave most/many of the groups they’re in when they start applying for jobs (not to mention they edit their personal info, and/or pull down their account). Any thoughts on employers using facebook to check out potential employees? Or universities for that matter…

Why I joined? Well, it had reached us (UK) in my final year of undergrad though I wasn’t aware of it at the time. A few years into postgrad and it seemed every undergrad was on there – our student paper even printed people’s profiles in their blind dating column. I just joined out of curiosity really, and found a whole bunch of people did around the same time (it being start of the year). Now it’s amazing how quickly it spreads to new students in fresher’s week, and I’m finding old school/undergrad friends.

There is a PhD thesis been completed on how the choice of MySpace or Facebook correlates to one’s social strata. At its most crude, Facebook = “educated ruling class teens” and MySpace = “multiple piercing, panda-eye mascara freaks” .

A rather peeved story on it at IT WIRE and the actual thesis by Danah Boyd, a post graduate student at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, is here.

So you lot are the hegemon. Bastards!

I’m being oppressed!