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Facebook-Related Musings
Sep. 9th, 2010 12:54 pmYou know, I always thought that Facebook was a great idea in theory. Before I realised what people were actually using it for, I sort of assumed it was the digital equivalent of a telephone book: a directory of names; the one place on the internet where it was pointless to not use your real one. For years I only had an account in case some random person unexpectedly wanted to find me, and I never visited the site at all unless I was searching for someone myself.
I still feel an irrational pang of disappointment whenever I see someone say that they're not on there, even though I completely understand why you might want to stay out of that mess. It's just, how am I supposed to find people?! Heh. Perhaps you can imagine how I felt when I first realised that phone books were opt-in, too. :P
It honestly saddens me how useless said phone books have become, by the way. Ten years ago it was still common practise to regularly look up people's numbers in them, now it doesn't even occur to me to try anymore. If you lose someone's number and don't happen to know either their email address or where they live, you're just screwed. Well, uh ... unless they're on Facebook, of course. XD Which only brings me back to: I always thought it was a great idea in theory.
If there was an alternative, I'd totally delete my account. And by "alternative" I don't mean yet another social networking website with most of Facebook's current features; I mean a searchable directory of as many people as possible. Wouldn't it be great if someone created something like that and made it so safe and easy-to-use that it would become extremely popular? I wish I had the skills and resources to do it myself.
Of course it would be neat if those who mostly use FB for its social networking capacities had an alternative as well, but that's at least been tried before. This, however? Never heard of such a thing, and that's a shame because I bet there are many more FB users like me, who only reluctantly signed up in order to search and be found.
Gah, now my head is filled with ideas and I have nowhere to put them.
I still feel an irrational pang of disappointment whenever I see someone say that they're not on there, even though I completely understand why you might want to stay out of that mess. It's just, how am I supposed to find people?! Heh. Perhaps you can imagine how I felt when I first realised that phone books were opt-in, too. :P
It honestly saddens me how useless said phone books have become, by the way. Ten years ago it was still common practise to regularly look up people's numbers in them, now it doesn't even occur to me to try anymore. If you lose someone's number and don't happen to know either their email address or where they live, you're just screwed. Well, uh ... unless they're on Facebook, of course. XD Which only brings me back to: I always thought it was a great idea in theory.
If there was an alternative, I'd totally delete my account. And by "alternative" I don't mean yet another social networking website with most of Facebook's current features; I mean a searchable directory of as many people as possible. Wouldn't it be great if someone created something like that and made it so safe and easy-to-use that it would become extremely popular? I wish I had the skills and resources to do it myself.
Of course it would be neat if those who mostly use FB for its social networking capacities had an alternative as well, but that's at least been tried before. This, however? Never heard of such a thing, and that's a shame because I bet there are many more FB users like me, who only reluctantly signed up in order to search and be found.
Gah, now my head is filled with ideas and I have nowhere to put them.
