Social Networking

My daughter Elizabeth finally harrassed me into joining FaceBook - if only to get access to some pictures I seem never to be able to get her to email to me.  Along the way I looked over MySpace, and have started playing with Skype and a webcam.

Now I need a 40-hour day just to pay visits to all this stuff along with all the stuff I should be doing.

Interestingly enough, both FaceBook and MySpace have found for me people that I have known over the years but could no longer find.  Of course, most of my generation won't be represented there because we tend to be Luddites - but it was surprising just which ones I could fine.  I also discovered a bunch of folks overseas who may be related to people with whom I was close, so a bunch of messages went out this afternoon while I was supposedly working.  

I should explain that part of what I do involves fixing things that break, and when nothing is broke and everything else is on schedule, I don't really have that much required of me, so I can cheerfully do other things as long as I am not too obvious about it (playing Solitaire will get me yelled at....)

I showed FaceBook to my wife, and she was horrified at the amount of personal information that she was able to see there on various people - but it is a new day, I explained and much of this is put out there to find folks of like mind with whom to converse.

I'm not all that thrilled with the search capabilities, however - I would love to be able to use more of Google-like searches, with phrases and separate words and groups to narrow the search.  Looking for Lang brings over 500 names - if I could look for Lang in Germany, the list would be smaller.  Maybe if I complain they'll fix it?  I dunno.

It has been interesting looking at how some members have customized their pages (some to the point that their color choice makes reading their information impossible, at least to my ancient eyes) and just how artistic some are.  I also stumbled into some pretty crude sexual stuff, but it seems that these wallwriters are ever among us, and to do anything besides ignore just encourages them.

Facebook and MySpace have interesting possibilities - I just wonder how long they can stay free of charge?  Someone somewhere is spending a lot on servers and disk space, and I wonder what their return is (besides advertising dollars, that is...)

If you have not looked into FaceBook and MySpace, by all means do it - give it a few hours, and then see who shows up to talk with you, and who you can find that disappeared from your area years ago.  You might reap a pleasant surprise or two.

As for Skype, well, the technology works - my wife and I chatted with our son who's in New Zealand (although he may be in Australia by now) and watched his face as we chatted (and he watched ours) using a couple of cheap webcams, our fast connection, and Skype - which at that time had in excess of 12 MILLION active users on line. 

And to think that when I started working on computers they all had tubes in them.

Amazing stuff out there, but you gotta mess with it to see its worth - just hearing about it or reading reviews is not good enough.

Happy Friday, y'all....