I don't bother with groups, and I normally only visit Facebook when I get an email about some important thing (I turned most off, just things like direct messages to me and such are sent via email). Other than that I visit once in a while, look at pictures of my niece and stuff.

Basically I look at Facebook as a collection of substandard social contact tools all in one place. It's good enough to get the job done, and it's easy enough to ingore all of the stupid parts (status messages, spam chain notes, the wall, etc).

Facebook is nice for its original purpose: keeping track of everybody at school. The people I meet there generally aren't my friends, I don't remember their names, nor do I want to exchange contact information. However, it is useful to use Facebook to keep track of them.

Probably 98% of my Facebook "friends" are those people I meet at school who aren't my friends, but I might just want to contact them about something or go to an event they are hosting. After I'm done with school, I doubt I'll keep my Facebook account.

Twitter? It's like taking Facebook and removing everything except the status message. Completely stupid.

Heh, some of those photos are quite neat, like:

{"name":"1236208524499_f.jpg","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/2\/3\/233e1c90fcaff0d1066011adc11593b7.jpg","w":500,"h":346,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/2\/3\/233e1c90fcaff0d1066011adc11593b7"}

Yea, that is kinda crappy. You know you've got the world by the balls when develop a product which includes/excludes people socially.

at work making some bills yo

Not sure how Facebook excludes people socially. It's certainly helped my family stay in touch and it's not like adding someone as a friend there is hard. Check it when you check your email. Not hard.

Texting definitely has its uses. It's useful if you're in a public place and don't want to disturb people, or if you're nervous about calling (for whatever reason - for many people this includes general shyness).

Of course from a technical standpoint they could easily have allowed much longer messages per unit of money, but most people won't understand how the data bandwidth compares and will compare the obvious metric: the number of words you can express per unit of money. The mobile phone industry is full of greedy ruthless evil people (my former boss worked in it and regularly testifies), so it's no surprise they took advantage.

Wait, you're complaining that people have stopped talking about:

• cars (Why would you want to discuss them? They're ugly!)

• politics (Why would you want to discuss it? It's full of liars and hideously complicated and boring!)

• women (Yes, we [guys] all love them, but the subject gets old and it isn't exactly healthy if it's all you can think of)

• weather (Well yeah, this one's fun to discuss)

• our life (i.e. Facebook... hmm)

and are now talking about something computery, even if it is Facebook?

I think the allegation is that if you aren't using Facebook like everyone else, you miss out on stuff.

I'm still trying to work out whether it's true or not. Given that people do, rightly or wrongly, execute some of their social lives on Facebook, and good friendships often form simply from people seeing a lot of each other because they're in the same class or the same activity or whatever, my current conclusion is that if you don't participate, it may take longer to get properly integrated into whatever social circle you are hoping to get integrated into.

So if you don't interact in this social system, you don't know what's going on. This blows my mind.

Boy you know your friends are a sad bunch when they are talking about FB in real life. Seriously, you need to straighten them out.

I enjoy Twitter. It's nice for following real-life friends as well as products and companies. I operate Birdhive, which is a link curation engine powered by Twitter users. And I've also developed a Twitter client for the OS X dashboard.

For me, it essentially fulfills the role of an RSS aggregator. I also favour it over Facebook because it is essentially one of the only social networking websites that is entirely anti-social. I can remain largely anonymous, rather than worrying that my photographs will end up splashed all over the web after a particularly messy night out.

fb is a good socializing tool.

[quote] *

cars (Why would you want to discuss them? They're ugly!)
*

politics (Why would you want to discuss it? It's full of liars and hideously complicated and boring!)
*

women (Yes, we [guys] all love them, but the subject gets old and it isn't exactly healthy if it's all you can think of)
*

weather (Well yeah, this one's fun to discuss)
*

our life (i.e. Facebook... hmm)
[/quote]

Minus weather, all those are pretty good topics. Cars and hoes are awesome.

We had lovely weather today. I cycled all the way to Ickleton, discovered this utterly awesome path, and ate some of the best pub food I've ever had. The whole thing took 7 hours - 7 hours of car-free awesomeness.

All this was preceded by a message from a certain someone, hoping I had nice weather too. It's the first time she's sent me a pointless message just to show she's thought of me. Aww.

Now we just need the politicians to ban cars and we're all set.

(I wonder if I should put my trip on Facebook)

[EDIT]
ReyBrujo - wow... yeah, I didn't know any of that.

But mobile phone companies are full of evil people.