Adventures in Meyr Land

After much coercing and bribing I was finally convinced to dive into another social networking site. Ok really I got a couple of good recommendations from friends that this site would actually be fun and useful.

Enter facebook.

I have very mixed feelings about social networking sites. They fall into two categories. One of which I have been using for a while and find very rewarding. These are the sites that have a narrowly defined purpose. Two examples of these are flickr and LinkedIn. Both are designed for a specific use. In this case sharing photos and keeping track of your professional network. Because they are tailored to a specific subject they are easily cataloged in the brain. Meaning that your brain automatically thinks of them when in certain settings, “I just took some pictures, I’ll put them on flickr”. To me this makes them easy to integrate into your daily routine.

The other category is more ambiguous, more like social networking blobs. These would be the preverbal myspaces and friendsters of the world. My main problem with these is that they try and cover so many uses that its hard for the brain to associate them with a specific scenario. Are they a way to keep track of friends, meet new friends, communicate with friends, define yourself, etc… This brings up another gripe I have with social networking sites in general, namely why do you need 500 friends? Doesn't the constant growth of 'friends' ultimately dilute the whole experience? At what point does having too many contacts detract from communicating with the contacts you actually want to communicate with?

So why did I decide to rescind my ban on social networking friend sites and spend time filling out my facebook profile. Firstly there was a critical mass of friends who recently started using it, making the benefits immediately apparent. I was also informed by many people that facebook had gotten the design and application community right. This was another of my peeves with previous sites, MySpace in particular. Have you every looked at a MySpace page and been struck by a sudden wave of nausea? You are not alone. The design of MySpace pages is horrible, contributing to bad web design everywhere. I was reassured that facebook did not suffer from this flaw and was pleasantly surprised with the look and feel. It is easy to navigate and looks good while doing it. The other aspect of facebook that I want to single out is the availability of networking applications. Facebook is treated like the underlying backbone on which people can write their own applications that use the connections make through facebook. Something about this attitude just sings to the free market engineer in me.