Facebook Attacks

January 19, 2009

I generally don’t check my email much on the weekends, but yesterday Courtney mentioned she had forwarded me something, so I pulled it up. And I had an Inbox full of emails from Facebook! So-and-so has added me as a friend, so-and-so wants me to check out their profile, etc.

At face value there wasn’t anything wrong with this — these were all legitimate friends — except I don’t have a Facebook account. I’m quite adamant about not signing up for one, actually.

Well, OK, I guess I should fess up: I have some vague memory of creating one years ago because I wanted to see a photo a friend had sent me a link to, or something along those lines. So in reality, I probably do have an account, and it is likely what these friends found, but I have no idea what the login name is (though I could make a good stab at the password, since I use the same throw-away password for any page I don’t care about).

But I have to wonder: what is it that drew in these friends, all in their mid- to late-twenties, to getting so active in Facebook? Obviously one of them found me, and the others all promptly followed suit. Of course, then I also have to wonder: what is it about these social networking sites that I hate so much? I do use Linked In a little bit, so I don’t think it’s the concept in and of itself.

Sure, I first and foremost hate MySpace because it’s so darn ugly. But it is at least a little useful when there’s a band or musician I want to check out. Facebook on the other hand, is utterly useless without an account. Pretty much the only page you can get to is the Create an Account page. So how the heck did that thing even take off in the first place?

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