[rewind]

I find it humorous that there is such a need to DEFINE Facebook. It's different things to different people. We really don't need one definition of what it is or a nice tidy list of the ways people use it, what the benefits are, what the drawbacks are, etc. Every time I read about somebody complaining about Facebook, I usually just end up thinking "I don't use it (exactly) that way, so this doesn't (completely) apply to me."

I have a lot of friends that I don't see more than once every year or two, but I will be close to them until the day I die. I like seeing their status updates, their vacation photos, their kids, etc. Facebook makes our connection stronger, not weaker. It doesn't replace the need to see them and talk to them; it makes those infrequent visits/conversations better when they happen because it feels like we haven't really been out of touch for so long.

[jbondeson]

Oddly enough I have the exact opposite take on it. My wife and I both don't have Facebook accounts, and while most of my friends also do not have accounts, many of my wife's friends do. These friends live in the same state as us, and while we don't live in the same city we still manage to get together frequently. In the last few years we have noticed quite the trend: everyone of these people on Facebook would do a double-take whenever we didn't hear about some large event in their life. They assume that because it was on their Wall, that everyone knew about it. They didn't think to _call_ all their friends to talk about the great news, they simply threw it up on their Wall without thought.

No longer do you have to think about your friends as individuals and how you're going to break news to them, or how they are going to react -- now you can simply throw up a general message and lose the individuality in a flood of responses.

The depersonalization of communication has been exacerbated by a number of different technologies (such as email), however Facebook has allowed us to perfect the art communication without soul.

[philwelch]

Personally, it gets tiresome to have the exact same conversation, individually, with a dozen different friends. There's no "soul", for me, in repeating virtually the same scripted interaction over and over again when I can just inform everyone all at once and get it over with.

If I'm talking to you, I want to have a conversation that actually pertains to our unique set of mutual interests. I honestly think of things during the day that I know one particular friend of mine would be interested in discussing, and I remember to discuss it with them later. And it's easier, not harder, to have those kinds of personal talks when I don't have to waste time on scripted boilerplate about what just happened in my life.

[jbondeson]

If you're repeating the exact same thing to a dozen different friends I'm going to assume that you (or they) are not engaged by the news -- which is what I call "life trivia."

Most of what I see on twitter is this trivia, "I refinished my floors," "I bought an iPad." Would you normally go out of your way to talk about this to anyone who didn't ask "What did you do this weekend?" Probably not, so why do you feel the need to broadcast it to the world via Twitter/Facebook/<Insert Lifeless Tech Here>?

Now take something you have a passion for. I personally am an avid homebrewer and love to talk about beer. I'll talk to a half dozen different friends about the latest batch of beer I made and have completely different conversations and get insights into what they like. I have friends that are huge into climbing, now I have no big interest in it myself, but their passion draws me into the conversations and over the past decade I've learned more about climbing than I ever would have if it were just some posts.

It takes an amazing writer to really evoke the emotions that most of our daily conversations have, and let's face it, the world isn't exactly filled with amazing writers.

[philwelch]

From personal experience, "I just graduated, got a new job, and moved to Seattle" and "my mom died" both count as "life trivia". Haven't really heard anyone come up with a new take on either of those subjects yet.

[kissickas]

I still think new information can be created through conversations regarding those subjects better than it can be through facebook. Speaking with someone about your mom dying is bound to be more consoling than having someone comment "My condolences! What a great person" and- hopefully not- "4 people liked this."

Likewise, people will ask interesting questions if you tell them you're moving to a new place, maybe helpful things you wouldn't think of yourself, or just an outside perspective which would be impossible in a change as large as a career change + move. What would your facebook friends contribute? "~Seahawks, represent!~"?

[philwelch]

Speaking with someone about your mom dying is bound to be more consoling than having someone comment "My condolences! What a great person" and- hopefully not- "4 people liked this."

Not really. It's just tiresome and awkward. Unrelatedly, I've also had fairly intelligent (even HN-caliber) discussions on Facebook. It all depends on who your friends are.

Plus, posting something on Facebook doesn't preclude anyone from talking with me about it in person on the rare chafe they have something to say.

[drndown2007]

BUT when you just throw it up on the wall, you have no idea if anyone read it. And chances are, most of them didn't (didn't check in regularly enough, or they did check in, but your post wasn't one of the top 10 that was put on their page, etc).

So did you really tell anyone?

[philwelch]

Generally, it covers most of the people who care.

[drndown2007]

Are you sure? When I login I seem to see 5-10 posts from a list of 100 people (well, admittedly less since I've ignored so many). I you were my friend, how could you know _you_ were in that 5-10 posts that _I_ see -- you don't know how many other friends I have, and how much _they_ have posted.

[philwelch]

Thankfully, I don't use Facebook as some kind of guaranteed-delivery broadcast medium.

[robryan]

You can always check your close friends profiles from time to time.

[1337p337]

It's funny you should mention being married, because that's why I don't have a Facebook account.

I signed up for MySpace because a girl elected to give me her MySpace username instead of her phone number. I haven't logged in since before meeting my wife, and never got a Facebook account because I haven't yet needed one.

It seems to me to be the difference between spending time and wasting it. All I've heard about the site is photo sharing, discussing parties, people being shocked at the drop-down other people clicked for their relationship status, and games that used to be pointless (like that silly game about buying your friends or the vampire game) but have recently become manipulative and borderline malicious (Zynga). It consumes time without providing value. I have enough useless stuff competing for my time against valuable stuff.

So far, the only actually useful social site I've used is GitHub, which is more about adding a social component to doing things. I do enjoy Twitter (which is pretty tolerable and not too demanding if you keep your "following" count low enough), where I read jokes my friends make and occasionally find an interesting link or two. I had high hopes for LinkedIn, but it mostly gets me recruiter spam. ("Do you want to add me as a connection so we can network?", "Do you want to do VB.NET?", "Do you want to move to San Francisco?", "Do you want to take a pay cut and work overtime because our atmosphere is so darned quirky and fun?", and my favorite so far, "Do you want to work for Zynga?"...Nope, none of those.)

[smackfu]

Geeky example, but it's like RSS. Instead of having to manually check every website for updates, they all get pulled in to a central place where you can keep tabs on them yourselves.

[zipdog]

Interesting point. I was reading a sociologist (Simmel) talk about the rise of individualism leading to the abstraction of other people: coming to think of them as all just 'friends' rather than seperate individuals we relate to differently.

[haraball]

On the other hand, it also removes the need to contact that person since you already know all the latest news. I'm not comfortable in situations when I meet people I don't see often and they tell me things that I already know, and I have to pretend to not knowing it to avoid the stalkerish feeling it gives me.

[glhaynes]

I know the feeling. In that circumstance, since the person apparently wants to talk about that news, I try to find something to ask them about it that I don't already know the answer to. Which could even just be to ask them how they feel about that news (which can be in the form "I bet you're happy about that...", etc), since I don't usually know that. That way, they get to talk about what they want to talk about and I get to hear about things I don't already know. Whether to make it clear that I already knew the basics or not depends on the circumstance.

[robryan]

It's the issue with people putting a lot of stuff out there but expecting people to consume only the newest stuff and forget that anything older exists kind of like real life conversations drift from relevance over time as subjects change.

Something like reading back through a few months of someones Facebook isn't really socially acceptable even though they are putting it all out there.

[trustfundbaby]

You are absolutely right ... Facebook has broadened my social circle in ways that would have been impossible just 6 years ago ...

Sure I don't call all 600 people on my friends list every week or have deep profound conversations with them all the time, but now I know enough about so many people in so many different places. People I could never have met ordinarily.

And I met them through other friends so that gives us enough familiarity that I could go to a new city of a friend on facebook and think nothing about asking them to come have a beer with me or send them a note asking about things to do in their city or what not. It could become a stronger friendship or they could have no personality, but its the possibility of friendship that fascinates me.

We're still working out the kinks with new forms of online communication (twitter/blogging/facebook) etc, but once we do, I have no doubt that we will see that they are net positives for us as a species.