It's been a while since I've been inspired to blog again. I got sucked into the vortex of Facebook for a while. It was fun for a bit. Then it became a little tedious. Then it became a hideous mess. Mark Zuckerberg, you should hang your head in shame... your millionaire head!
The problem with social networking sites is one of depth. Interactions are superficial and shallow by design. The rise of Facebook applications were refreshing at first... then people's profile pages became bloated with Facebook plug-ins. The result is a collection of Frankenstein profile pages that spam you daily with update notifications.
Facebook tries to evolve into something beyond it's scope... but it drifts further away from it's core strengths. Facebook is good at keeping in touch with your peripheral social contacts (the ones you have not seen since high school or your friends who have moved out of town) but it's hardly a replacement for real social interaction with your close network of friends. It's also good for photo sharing. Those are the pillars that support Facebook's success, and everything else is just excess baggage.
I'm not all doom and gloom about social networking sites, though. This winter, I met up with an old friend who told me that Friendster was key in finding the love of his life. In fact, it was a random comment that I left on his Friendster page that caught the eye of his future bride. A truly amazing story to say the least.
In the end, I'm advocating balance. If your head is buried in any social website (Facebook, Friendster, Blogger, or World of Warcraft) more often than it should, remember that it can't compare to talking to a real person face-to-face.
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5 comments:
Yuppers... Balance is good. Mind you I haven't logged on in a while. LinkedIn is a good website to keep in touch with your professional contacts.
It has been a year of marriagehood for us. Thanks Ray!
It's funny how I followed you into blogging and now you're following me back to blogging.
Hey, let's have a RVD5!
I was tempted to come back for a while, but the straw that broke me was Vicki deleting the link to my blog from hers.
I guess that's what devoting your blog to Jay-Z for 6 months will do.
I hear that Mark Zuckerberg is actually worth a billion bucks now...
A billion dollars?! Well, depending on Zuckerberg's exact net worth, we will have to extrapolate how much value his head is worth relative to his entire body.
On that note, people are now coining the term Facebook Fatigue to describe this phenomenon.
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