A tip for how to feel young again: spend an hour or two (or more) aimlessly surfing on YouTube and Facebook. Anecodotal evidence suggests this is what all the high school and college kids are doing, and a good proportion of the twentysomethings (of which I am still (barely) a part -- yay).
These two sites are probably responsible (along with MySpace of course) for more wasted time than any phenomenon before them... Well I say wasted but at least Facebook seems to be yet another step in the evolution of social interaction -- you are never "alone", you are always in touch with friends even if keeping in touch is just scribbling some random one-liner on your friend's Facebook wall. It's post-IM (but maybe pre-Twitter).
I joined Facebook back when I first started at Microsoft; I put my profile up there, didn't put much effort into it, to be honest didn't have that many people to "Add to Friends" since I could only search through the Microsoft network... But just recently, for some reason, friends and colleagues have been popping out of the woodwork and doing the Facebook thing (or maybe it's only now that I'm noticing). Perhaps I've reached some kind of critical mass where I know sufficient people that network effects start kicking in. It's interesting to see who's connected to whom, and the mini-feed feature is kinda neat (even though when it first debuted people found it kinda creepy that you could see what your friends were doing online at Facebook).
I'm not sure Mark Zuckerberg was wise to knock back the however many millions he was offered for the company (is advertising their only revenue model?), but I have to admit it's one of the best social networking sites I've used. Yes, the garden is walled but the garden is not a bad place to be... It's also fast, sports an attractive interface (in contrast to MySpace whose design ethic if it exists is to encourage its users to make their homepages as garish as is possible), and the advertising is fairly unobtrusively placed (take note Windows Live Hotmail). Oh, and of course it's free.
And without further ado, I introduce you to the concept of Facebook stalking (thanks to Milly for the headsup):
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Posted by: Melvin Carlos | 05/11/2010 at 03:42 PM