Face-off

[howeird]

A couple of far-flung friends asked me to start a Facebook account, so I did.

I will not be using it much. The interface is obfuscatory, well beyond non-intuitive. It's "or" not "and" in design - you can be in only one network, if you want to sign into a school network you need an email account from that school (I went to college long before the Internet) if you want to sign into a company network, you need to give your work email address.

Uploading photos is bizarre- you choose a default photo, but it is not automatically the one which is shown on other people's friends page - you have to upload that one separately.

Every little action you take is logged on your home page. "howeird picked his nose at 11:45", etc.

Any value is negated by its difficult interface.

Comments

[pyrzqxgl.livejournal.com]

I won't say it's great, other than for keeping up with people for whom that's the way to keep up with (or for that matter seeing yet more about those people you never can get enough of), but you can be in up to five networks, and you can delete unwanted action notices from your mini-feed by going to your profile and clicking the little x's for the ones you want to delete.

[svashtar.livejournal.com]

I find it a little pointless. In my own account, I am constantly bombarded with people poking "me" and "throwing" things at me.

Maybe I just don't get it. Maybe I'm too old for those types of shenanigans. Maybe I just belong here, where I can do actual writing, and if people want to respond, they respond. If not, that's fine.