my facebook rant
so i originally signed up for facebook (i am resisting the word “joined”) to check out the interface, after i heard that during the events at virgina tech on 16 april 2007 many people there were finding out what was happening through facebook, rather than through the university administration.
i didn’t know what facebook was, and i had never heard of the word facebook in relation to the graduation books which are customary at american universities. what i'd heard was that it was like a “more mature” version of myspace which i loathed, and that one of the things that made it different was that you had to sign up with your real name, and that you joined a “network” relating to your place of work or education.
as someone who has maintained various web presence since way before web 2.0 (more like since web 0.2) using tools old and new, some of which it took years to learn how to use, and all of which vary in how interesting they are to other people; i didn't really see the need to be on facebook, especially since most of my web presences have been and are available from links on a single web page at my personal domain.
yawn. this seems kind of old school now.
and then the friend requests started rolling in, and they kept coming. interestingly in the middle of this flood i received an email from an old friend who i last heard from exactly, to the day almost, twenty years ago when i left tasmania to come back to the mainland. he had tracked me down through an google search i guess. it was great to hear from him. i immediately wrote back and filled him in on what i had been doing and to find out how he and his family were going.
so i mentally composed this email response. except you can't send an email in response to a facebook friend request without stuffing around in the facebook profile of the person who sent it. "accept friend request" is like the default option, right? so it didn't get sent but if they came to my site and clicked on the facebook link they would see it.
dear friend