18 thoughts on “One Of The Reasons I Don’t Do Much Facebook”

  1. I’d just like it if people who do didn’t assume everyone else does.

    For example “hey, look at this picture I took” followed by a link to facebook without the necessary setting so people who are not logged in can look at the picture.

    It’s especially annoying when NASA groups do this!

  2. Fascistbook was started at Harvard, wasn’t it? Why is everyone so surprised about this? I don’t have a Fakebook account, and never will, I don’t care if it’s “need it to join the 21st century.” What can I say — I was never much of a joiner.

  3. I have a Facebook account, and I very much do not trust them. Both it and a linked webmail account are only accessed from a VirtualBox VM running Ubuntu.

    Neither account has a link to any other of my web activity, so the problem Trent had would bite me too.

  7. Personally, I’ve never understood the attraction to Facebook and Twitter. Why would I be interested in posting personal information about myself and who would want to read it? Why would I be interested in reading personal info about others? It just has no appeal to me at all, but then, I’m not a narcissist. Perhaps they should call it Narcissism R Us.

  8. I still haven’t gotten around to trying Facebook. I’ve already got too much social media in my life. The only reason that’s come close to tempting me is the idea of being able to look up friends of mine from the Philippines that I’ve lost contact with over the years.

    ~Jon

  10. Facebook is how we coordinated our 10-year high school reunion, how many of my friends coordinate our local social events, and how I keep up with friends across the country that I would have more difficulty keeping in touch with otherwise.

    It has both its utility and its limitations. If it has no appeal to you, so be it, but I don’t think Larry’s characterization is accurate.

  11. Twitter at least doesn’t ask for intrusive personal info. I suppose Fakebook has its uses for people who want to keep up with old schoolmates (that they didn’t keep in touch with the old-fashioned way? Okay.) but I don’t understand why anyone would set up something as important (supposedly) as a political action group on a server belonging to people who are opposed to your political group. It would be one thing if it cost money — Bill Gates might have donated to the Obama campaign, but at the end of the day Republican and Libertarian money is as good as Democrat when it comes to selling his product. But Facebook is free. So if the people who run it decide they don’t want you to play with their toys any more, you have nothing to hold over them.

    Frankly, I suggest anyone who uses Facebook to keep in touch with family members, old army buddies, and so on, to get out that neglected address book gathering dust at the back of your desk and start writing down phone numbers and addresses. If your contacts are so important, why are you trusting the Cloud with them?

  12. I get where Andrea’s coming from: she’s saying we should keep in touch the old-fashioned way, like Xbox Live or Second Life.

  13. Never interested in Facebook, rarely use Twitter to ping long distance friends. Neither important to me or my acquaintances. Total waste of time and too likely to be used against the user. And as for Google: never use it.

  14. I use facebook only for family and relatives. I use Linkedin for business. And I have a separate email address for both for security reasons. And I don’t understand why folks would wish to mix the two.

    Like Andrea I also use the phone and text messaging for contacts, but its nice to keep in touch 24/7 with relatives who are spread around the world, or in the case of my son-in-law and brother-in-law, on combat deployment in the Mideast, where phone access is difficult/expensive.

  15. Do a little bit of searching for studies done on Twitter and you’ll find some interesting things. For one, almost half of Twitter users don’t actually approach anything resembling “use” of the service: they log in less than once a week, or never, and never read other people’s tweets nor do they post their own. More than half have no followers and are not on anyone else’s follower list.

    Of the remaining who post something, a Harvard study showed that 90% of all tweets are generated by about 10% of the top users–and about 0.05% of Twitter users (mostly media outlets, politicians, celebrities, and corporations) account for approximately half of all tweets that are actually read by other users.

    Roughly three-quarters of all Twitter users have posted fewer than 10 lifetime tweets.

    So given that it’s obvious that (a) unless you’re a celebrity, a politician, or a company, almost no one reads your tweets, and (b) a relative minority of users generate all the tweets to begin with, you DO end up with a few narcissists performing the online equivalent of staring at themselves in the mirror. Fortunately, for all the hubbub surrounding it, you can at least rest assured that the only thing you’re missing is joining a cool kids’ club for the sake of it. Those people laughing at you for being stone age codgers? Odds are good they don’t actually use it either.

  18. I quit Facebook 18 months ago, yet somehow I have managed to maintain contact with my family and friends. Gosh, I must be some kind of superman!

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