I’ve been avoiding the ‘social networking’ sites for a while now (I’m not exactly a social person at the best of times…) but recently I’ve started to feel a bit left out, as everyone else I know seems to be joining in, and my paranoia had me thinking that maybe it’s all some great club and everyone but me is having a jolly old time of it all. I don’t normally make a habit of bowing to peer pressure, but when Farhad told me I needed to sign up for Facebook I thought I may as well jump on the bandwagon. I’m still not sure what I (or any of my ‘Friends’) will get out of it, but for now it’s an interesting diversion.
Actually, I did join MySpace some time back (because I wanted to get hold of someone who was on there and could only see their details if I signed up), but that was all too busy and loud. Plus, the only people who wanted to be my ‘Friend’ seemed to be hookers or porn sites (as far as I could tell – their photos usually had them in their underwear, which doesn’t sound like any of my actual friends [sadly or thankfully, depending…]) so I gave up on it. I posted a link from my MySpace page to my website, and never logged on again.
Thankfully, Facebook seems a little more organized – and a lot easier to use. It also showcases some pretty interesting technology. As with a lot of Web 2.0 applications, there’s lots of plug-ins (‘applications’ in Facebook speak) that you can add to your profile content (presumably for the benefit of your friends…if they’re not too busy adding/customizing their own applications to visit your profile). So far so last year.
Where things get interesting (to me, anyway…) is being able to hook up to various other Web services. I’ve already got a blog and I can’t see myself writing more stuff just for Facebook, so I configured my Facebook ‘Notes’ page to pull in the latest posts from my blog. So I write this, and it automatically appears as a Note on my Facebook profile, without me having to do anything more than I’m doing already (which is pretty much the deciding factor with anything I do (or don’t) these days).  I’ve also started using Twitter recently (it feeds the Microblog on my blogsite), but Facebook expects me to also tell it what I’m up to (should anyone really care). No problem. I activated an application that automatically picks up on my ‘tweets’ (as they’re called in Twitter) and uses these to update my Facebook status for me. People also tend to list their hobbies, favorite books/films/bands, etc. in their Facebook profile. I’m too lazy to duplicate effort so I installed a couple of additional apps that pull my music details from my Last.fm profile, and my movies from my Flixster account. (Actually, Last.fm itself is fed the details from my iPod [via iTunes and then iSproggler] without me doing anything at all, so that’s entirely effort-free. Result!).
What really impresses me is the ease with which all of this can be done. Getting Twitter to feed Facebook took me about ten seconds. Really. I just activated the app, gave it my Twitter Userid, and it was off and running. No patching code, or creating watched folders on the server, or updating permissions tables, or any of that old-school effort.  Back in the Eighties I spent six months working on some network security software (IBM’s NetView/Access Services) that passed the status of one machine back to another machine. Six months! And all you got was the remote machine’s name on the gateway server highlighted if the machine was online, and not if it wasn’t. And we thought it was coolest thing ever!
Nowadays, one program works out how to connect to another program on its own, the new program will install and configure itself, and the two will start swapping all manner of information about you between themselves like old friends. And all without the need for a $1,000 a day ABAP programmer.  Which is pretty impressive when you think about it.  Maybe not that impressive to the average kid who has grown up with things working this way and assumes it’s always been like this, but for those of us who started out feeding paper tape into a machine the size of a small house that didn’t even have a screen, it’s major! (Do ‘the kids’ still say that?)
There’s probably more I could have done with my Facebook profile, but I’ve wasted enough time on all of this already (maybe that’s the point of it…). For now, if you crave more contact with me than this meager blog can provide, you can poke me in my Facebook. Or slap me on MySpace. Or you can finger me via LinkedIn, or Plaxo (no, the stuffing was Paxo), or whatever other social networking site I get suckered into joining next. Or you might not. If I log on to Facebook tomorrow and see I’ve still got no friends, I only have myself to blame. If only I’d been a bit more sociable in the past, instead of spending all of my time in front of my PC marveling at how grand technology is…
(* Internetting: Singlish for using the Internet. I don’t make this stuff up, you know…)
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