My Take on Facebook

To a certain extent I thought this friend of mine is smart when he insists not to join Facebook despite the constant pressure and "discrimination" we put on him. Well, to be honest I was awed at how cool the online social website was when I first signed up. Cool and elegant layout, simple and user friendly. And another reason was because I found a lot of old friends' contacts there. These friends whom I never thought I'd be able to keep in touch again, now are just a click away! And that meets the purpose of online social tools - to keep friends in touch with each other.

However, as Facebook evolves into something more than just an online social tool, when they add in a lot of applications and games which are supposely to further encourage the interaction among the users, and when I am too frequently informed of some unexpected behaviours of my friends in Facebook, I begin to wonder if Facebook is really that awesome now.

If you were to check out Facebook's blog or follow up with their chronology, you'd realise that Facebook has improved over time. Or at least I do think so. Previously the privacy level was very low. For example, what application you added, or quizzes you took, will all turn up in your friends' News Feed. And they will read about it. Of course, some of us may love the attention, but apparently some of us don't really like it to be this transparent. Hence soon we got to choose to hide certain information from being announced out loud. We can now choose to make it appear only on our own profile silently, and let those who're really interested to check it out with their own initiative, or, not to appear at all, and only you yourself will know the stupid (and sometimes funny) result of the quizzes.

I have been silencing a lot of unwanted infomation about my friends in the News Feed. For example, the result of the quizzes. Seriously, those quizzes are plain lame. But of course it's not wrong to give it a try. And if it is something funny, friends will comment about it, and there goes the interaction. However, sometimes there are just things I am totally not interested to know. For example, if one is a good kisser/lover or not. Because everyone seems to have positive results of ALL the tests. That explains basically all my scepticism towards the credibility of the quizzes.

Besides, as other online social tools, it cannot prevent your "friends" from stalking you on the web. Or worse, according to Cleo 2009 April issue (OMG where's my Gaya UKM?), some couples even stalk each other on the web! And soon you have this friend who knows that your boyfriend who accepted a sunflower Growing Gift from a popular rock-star friend of his who is a neighbour to your friend's relative who score 116 in his IQ test. And I haven't started about the inside jokes we shared among ourselves as we leave pictures/notes/videos comments which then become a public thing as long as that person is approved as a friend of yours. Right. All one need is an unsuspicious approval from you, and your friends (hence he'll have the Common Friends to draw links with) and there goes the exploration.

All this while I have been very careful on the approval thing. If I am not sure who that person is, I will check out his profile and pictures if possible to force myself to recollect someone named XXX. If at the end of the day, I am sure I don't know this person, then I won't feel guilty at all to ignore that fella. If I have no access to that person's profile, I'd send him a message asking him how we know each other (politely, of course). If that person didn't bother to reply, then of couse I will ignore him from then. Sometimes I don't even bother to check one's profile when I am sure I never have a friend named YYY.

And I have unchecked a lot of notification to be sent to my email account, giving myself some peace of mind. I value messages in Inbox and Wall in Facebook. That is how I love interaction between friends to be - real conversation with words, to a certain extent that I don't mind if you were to drop by and vandalise my Wall by typing some random words. Because I know you miss me, hee hee~ I don't mind if you don't send me FunToys everyday, although they are really cute.

Oh yeah, till here, I would like to announce that, I have not signed into Facebook since four days ago, and will not do so until mid of May. I have no way to sign in because I gave my password to a friend of mine whom I trust, to change it and keep it from me until I finish what I am suppose to pay attention to now. I believe he will not abuse my identity and will not infringe my privacy, too. I need to take my mind off Facebook a while. Surprisingly I have yet to long to sign into Facebook since then, and I have been feeling sick of the endless unnecessary applications and nonsense quizzes, and, some friends' behaviour. Sometimes it is best I don't know that they have a tendency to do such things so that my perception towards them will always remain positive.

*Until this point I can't help but to realise this post has very bad structure.*

But I still hope that smart friend of mine will get himself a Facebook. It is more fun to talk bad about someone right at their face lol. And because spamming on Facebook Wall is more fun than spamming in his near-forsaken blog.