… or, Why Should I Keep My Facebook-Account?
A while back I got myself an account on aforementioned website. I think it was in 2008, some time. Compared to many other social networks that I’ve become a member of, Facebook then seemed a lot nicer. People used their real names, had actual photos of themselves rather than some celebrity or lookalike, and also the somewhat strict and spartan design of the site meant that unlike hell-holes like MySpace you couldn’t do much in the way of fucking up customizing your profile.
So it seemed okay.
But recently there’s been a lot of changes that have made me lose what little affection I had for Facebook. Chief among these have been the draconian changes to privacy settings, but there was a lot of other things that changed too. In fact, the only thing I still really like about it is the status-updates. It’s an easy way to keep in touch with friends, and an easy way for me to dole out whatever brainfarts I get.
So last night while I was waiting for sleep to happen to me, I started thinking. Thinking about my Facebook-activities and parts of my online activities overall. I don’t blog as much as I used to, for example. There was a time when I would spew out long, rambling stuff on a daily basis. I don’t really do that as much any longer, not because I don’t enjoy writing but simply because I’ve grown a little tired of blogging and feel that my writing abilities could be focused on other ventures. So, blogging has been put on the back-burner, and occasionally I feel bad about it, but it’s really just evolutionary – maybe someday I’ll be back to producing mind-numbing tedious rants on a daily basis again, who knows?
I also started thinking about how I like the status-updates type thing on Facebook, which is essentially a type of micro-blogging. The problem there is that you basically have to be a member of Facebook and a friend of mine there to see them. I’ve locked down my privacy settings as hard as you can, and that keeps them pretty private.
But it would be nice to have some way of communicating these small brainfarts to the rest of the world, outside of the iron curtain of my Facebook privacy settings. Which led my thoughts to Twitter.
Now, my official disposition to Twitter is utter contempt. I actually do like the concept of microblogging but I dislike Twitter and the whole culture of tweeting and blapping and retweeting and booming and jonesing and poppin’ and lockin’ and whatever other jargon they use. Every time I’ve encountered Twitterites (Twitters? Twitterers? Tweeters?) I’ve always gotten the impression that to use the service you have to buy into the whole culture. This annoys me. I want to use it my way, not the same way as everyone else. But maybe that’s just me being stubborn and backwards and get-off-my-lawn-you-damn-kids type grumpy.
Secondly, if I’m gonna go for the tweeting then I want a mobile way of doing it. As it is, I’m locked down to my computer to twitter stuff, and when I have a brain-fart on the go I’d need some type of mobile device to do this. My current phone is a SonyEricsson K750, it’s going on a bit over five years old and while surprisingly capable it still is pretty dumb. But I like it fine, it still works great and apart from some minor scrapes a bruises it’s essentially in mint condition. Maybe there’s some Java Twitter or something for it? I’ll better check that out.
Now, return to Facebook. I’m seriously thinking about ending my tenure there. The annoyances are becoming to severe. But, I still want to be able to give y’all status updates. Thus, Twitter seems like the perfect replacement. At least until Diaspora goes online in half a month or so, and I’m very curious about that thing. But Twitter exists and is ready.
I’m not sure about these plans either. This is essentially just me ventilating my thoughts, which is why you have a blog.
