I’m in Facebook

Yes, I’m also in Facebook. I don’t even remember when I created the account. Must be just one of those sites I’ve sometimes visited and registered to. Then just forgotten it. There are so many sites I sometimes register to see if they offer something useful. And if I don’t see anything useful there I just forget them. At first it looked like Facebook was one of those useless Web 2.0 sites with lots of hype but nothing really useful.

Then I got e-mail that one of my co-worker wants to add me as a friend. I quickly just logged in and accepted the request. And forgot the site again. There isn’t much in default Facebook profile after creating it.

Few weeks later I heard two co-workers talking – first one had done something interesting and second one had seen it from the Facebook profile. So people really use it and share information through it? I decided to look at it more carefully again.

How wrong had I been! When I started actively looking at Facebook I started to understand why people are there. There is a lot of entertainment available. Lots and lots of small applications you can add to your profile, take quizzes, send and receive gifts, hug friends and whatever! There are apps for sharing images and videos too. Just looking at all those fun images and videos people share would be worth of it. But there is so much more. And all this of course is part of this “social networking”. So entertainment value is great. And I’m certainly using many of these fun applications already. And all this working because you are sharing things with your friends. When I created my account and didn’t yet have any friends, I couldn’t see all the possibilities.

But how about something really useful, not just entertainment when you want to spend some time?

That is a lot harder question. I’ve tried many interesting applications, installed, tried and then uninstalled. Quality of many applications just sucks. Its kind of same thing that happened when Visual Basic was published. Everybody could do programs, so everybody did. Now that everybody can make those nice Facebook applications, everybody is doing them. Finding useful and/or quality applications is too hard.

One application saved me really. The Slates application is great! It allows me to write notes, thoughts, opinions and whatever I want to write. I can write public messages for others to read, or private messages for myself (or for later publishing). I can add tags to keep up with my texts. Just what I needed. I’ve already written several non-public text and started couple. I’m sure I’ll be writing many texts. And I can edit them whenever I can access my Facebook profile. Earlier I wrote these kind of texts as mails in gmail.

For people like me who like to write things down, that alone would keep me using Facebook. So we have the entertainment, and one really useful application. I’m still really missing other useful applications. I tried one calendar application but it was using some external calendar service. Too bad. Calendar could have been second really useful application.

I’ve also tried to look at Facebook as WinMerge developer. Can I use Facebook somehow to help my WinMerge efforts. Other than letting people know more about me? I’m not sure. I created WinMerge group, but again as there really aren’t groupware applications (or I haven’t found them) I think the usage is very limited. I can post items about releases, and there can be discussions about WinMerge. But all that is already available in several other places. Maybe it has some value that people can do it in same application (Facebook) and don’t need to login to other sites has some value. Anyway, I’m keeping the WinMerge group and I accept people there. Maybe it is good to just have WinMerge to show in your profile’s group list?

It was also very disappointing to find out there is no good way to make my blog posts to show up in my profile page. I found one working RSS software, but it is far from good. Also, there is no way to just add list of my favorite links?! Some links could be public, but I don’t want to publish links to some non-public servers. Still I’d like to keep those links easily available somewhere… I can create Slate article and add them there, but shouldn’t links application be a very basic Facebook application? Aren’t people sharing links anymore? Yes, there is that Posted Items -application. But as I wrote I want to control visibility.