What's good about having a Facebook page? I'm old, so I don't cotton so easily to all these new fangled social environments.
Honestly? I don't think anything. I get that I'll have to have one eventually for networking purposes, but seriously facebook annoys the crap out of me
There's nothing good about having a facebook page, unless you want to be popular among people you will probably never meet in your life, and trust me, you DON'T want to meet them! I was "forced" to open an account there (by a woman) but I never really understood the utility of these (anti)social networks and I got bored. Much better to post on a board with interesting people.
It's useful for contacting people who aren't in your immediate presence. It isn't, contrary to popular belief, the antichrist. It's just a social networking site. And the inspiration for a bad film.
Couldn't have said it better. It's just a way to chat with friends or get into contact with them quickly. It's also a really good way to organise large events at the last minute! I mean I dont really fancy ringing my entire rowing clubbing and asking them out for drinks. Instead I just mass message them on facebook...much easier! Sure some people use it to be popular/stalk and whatever but personally im just using it to chat with friends.
I actually got an account, or rather a girl I knew did it for me, when it was only available to college students all those years ago. I haven't used it until recently when I needed to track down some people for a small not for profit I help out sometimes. It was very useful, as most of the people lived internationally.
The very best thing, in my opinion, about having a Facebook is trolling people. Of course, it's only fun for me because I used to be religious and now all the people I grow up with add me out of some weird sense of obligation and then never talk to me, so I enjoy deliberately saying things to horrify them...so that might not be fun for everyone. Like Banzai said, though, it's also good for keeping in touch with people who don't live near you. I live in a different state than my family and most of my friends, and I also have a lot of friends from here, so it's nice to have one place I can go to keep track of what's going on with all of those people. edit: I feel compelled to add that I do find it somewhat of a pain in the *ss having parental figures on there. My dad used to be on mine (he deleted his page, thank Jesus), and apparently my use of words like "hell" really offended him because he used to complain to my mom about it. Also, my husband's mom now has a facebook, so every time we visit her we have to explain privacy settings and reassure her that random strangers aren't looking at the pictures that she has no idea how to upload to her profile...
My freshmen year was when facebook hit it huge (my small university somehow was one of the first 100 schools to be on facebook), and it was awesome. It was a complete accessory to college life. There were no high schoolers or parents (you had to have a .edu email, and professors still hadn't heard about it) and so the humor was very "college." Now, after graduation, I find it the only way to keep in contact with my friends that weren't "best friends". Very few people seem to want to keep in contact via email or phone calls. Facebook messages and/or facebook wall posts seem to be the #1 way my friends and I keep in contact if we live in different states.
I only use it to be in groups like this photo club that I'm a member of. They release announcements there. I couldn't care less about making friends on FB. I prefer the real life.
Actually, every person on my facebook are people I know and can say who they are. The only way to be friends with someone is if they approve it... it's not like this forum where you sign up and you can talk to anyone. On Facebook you can message a complete stranger, but it's not the protocol. If you don't join all the stupid popular pages you never have to encounter anyone who isn't friends/family/work colleagues. It does what it says on the tin - it's like the ultimate address book, which cuts out a LOT of middle men. I go on facebook a lot - I have always got friends in different places, since I joined basically because my friends from sixth form were all going to different unis, so initially all my friends were from Hastings but living in other parts of the country. Steadily my family's been joining Facebook, and most of my family lives on another continent to me, so it's the one place I ever really talk to some seriously cool uncles and cousins. At uni I added a ton of people, and now I've left uni they're also scattering back home, elsewhere to work, or even emigrating. So again, having everyone I once knew in one place is beyond wonderful. In the old days I'd have needed a folder and hundreds of pounds of stamps to keep in contact with all of them, but now I can just check my wall every day and drop them a line, or just comment to let them know I'm aware they still exist and count them as a friend. For example, I have a cousin I never knew existed until she added me on facebook and now I think we're friends... I'd never have known to write to her if we were back in the paper and pen age. The only downside is that some people turn out to be annoying on the internet when they're lovely/tolerable in real life. One of my bestest friends is Farmville obsessed... I play it to keep her company, but only with minimal interest, while it's all she ever seems to talk about/use Facebook for, so I have to see a lot of Farmville posts, as the only way of keeping in contact with one of the most beloved people in my life. And a couple of the quiet kids I added to be friendly are obsessively clingy, but I can just ignore them at least.
Like what many other people said, I use it to keep in touch with many of my friends whom I can't contact otherwise because they live 1000+ miles away. It's really, really wonderful to be able to check up on them even though it's unlikely we'll ever meet up again. Of course, there are people who use facebook to friend just about anybody who wants to friend them, which is certainly not a good idea. However, I think the amount of those people are exaggerated by the media to some degree - there are people out there who make sure they only keep in contact with friends and not weirdos (like me, I hope). Like every other tool, facebook requires a good amount of caution and wisdom - after all, I wouldn't go sending an envelope with pictures of a frat party to my friend if I know there's a chance their parents might open up that envelop, right?
I enjoy Facebook tremendously (albeit I'm only on the thing maybe 10-15 minutes a day). It makes it easy to keep in contact with a lot of the friends I've made over the years. Some that I have even forgotten managed to show up and track me down. I love creating events on Facebook for our social gatherings. It makes it easier for everyone to respond and they'll always reply one way or another. Social Media is the future. Companies and businesses are going ballistic over it. It's practically changed the face of advertising as we know it.
Urgh, I'm not that fanatic about it. I only really have it so I can keep in contact with university people.
It helps you keep contact with people that you might otherwise not be able to do so with. ...And that's about it. I don't get the people who spend ages commenting on friends' photos, watering imaginary plants or anything like that. But each to their own, I guess.
Keeping contact with people I don't see a lot (my best friends don't have a facebook) and sharing pictures.
I agree with everyone who uses it to keep in touch with people. I personally know everyone I am friends with on my Facebook. If I didn't have it, I know I would have lost touch with most of my old friends. My Mum, Dad and all my grandparents are on Facebook too, which I actually quite like, considering I'm really close to my folks, and I live in a different city to them. Sadly, however, when I called home about a week ago, to chat to everyone, neither Mum nor Dad wanted to talk to me. Why? Well, they were engaged in an exciting game of Scrabble. Fair enough, Scrabble is pretty intense. However, despite the fact that we have a perfectly adequate Scrabble board in our games cupboard, they were sitting with their laptops out on the dining room table, playing it via Facebook. I will never understand this sort of behaviour.
I live quite far away from a lot of my relatives and it's nice to just check in and make sure they're okay, I also live about 6 hours away from where I grew up and I'm not that social so I don't really go to see them much, that and the time I'd have to take off work and other complicated excuses I make up to get out of it, but it's nice to see what people are up to sometimes when the curiosity takes me. Really I just use it to find out about events my friends are setting up like fancy dress egg and spoon races and tea parties, or cocktail nights with old colleagues, cinema trips or writing groups. That kind of thing. I only go on there now when I get an invite or a message which is pretty infrequent.
It's good for social events. My class organises things all the time and they usually show up on facebook. A guy I know who doesn't have facebook misses out on a few because he doesn't hear about them.
I helped planned my 5-year high school reunion, and I had to call a ton of people who were not on facebook. It was soooo much easier to contact the people who had facebook. I didn't have facebook in High School (again, it started my freshmen year of college), but my brother, a sophomore, says he gets a ton of grad school invitations on facebook. People are not using personal invitations anymore. But you know what? Facebook can get extremely impersonal, and he is getting inundated with over a hundred grad school parties for seniors he had never met. So it can be really helpful for organizing events, but it can also get impersonal, and you will find yourself invited to a lot of events that you have no intention of going to.
Yeh it's amazing for keeping in contact with people! I have quite a few friends who are in other countries with whom it would be quite hard to keep in contact with without facebook.
I tend to use it for organising trips/nights out, keeping up with college info and for keeping in touch with friends/family. I don't really use any of the other features like playing games, apps, pages, etc.
Yeah, what is up with people using it to play things like farmville? Seriously, I like computer games but that's jut so pointless!
Nightshade - Agreed on them being pointless! Plus, I kind of figured they were uncool when I received one of those annoying game requests from my grandmother...
But FB games let me have a Dragon! I can't have a dragon in real life... Leave me and my dragon alone! *pets dragon*
To be honest, before I got my Facebook in August of 2009, I hated, and I mean *hated*, social networking. All my friends were always like, "Oh you should join MySpace, you should join so-and-so", but I never saw the point in those sites. They seemed too vapid to me. My friend made me sign up for Facebook in the summer of '09 at her house and while I was wary at first, I grew to love it. Now it's kind of an addiction of mine. Hey, I'm 16, what are you gonna do. The thing I like about it is that I can talk to family members that I haven't seen in years or old friends I moved away from when I was younger. I can talk to so many people, use it to organize things with my friends and keep in touch with loved ones. Plus, it's a lot cleaner, a lot better designed and a lot more user-oriented than MySpace. Truthfully, Facebook is the only social networking site I've ever really liked -- besides this forum, of course.
