We all have our little quirks; our irrational dislikes and likes, usually based on little else than gut instinct and some indefinable background noise. In any event, one of mine was always Facebook, which for some reason I was always bizarrely proud of the fact whilst the rest of the sheeple were signing up for it in droves (or herds?), I had remained above the ovine stampede, pure and untouched by the stigma. This is kind of like the social media equivalent of refusing to admit to liking pop music on the basis of whatever is popular with the masses cannot possibly be good. Well, sometimes, very occasionally, pop music can be good, so why not Facebook?

My other reasons for not wanting to sign up were based on more of a drip drip of negative news stories about Facebook over the past couple of years. Security concerns, dictatorial changes to Terms & Conditions, poxy people you went to school with tagging you in old and embarassing photos and employers going on there and finding out you are a drunken twat. Such things didn’t fill my head with positive images of Facebook. All of this was not aided by other peoples descriptions of it; lots of games, bizarre sounding groups and scrawling on walls, all of which don’t particularly appeal to me. So why join then, especially after being so scathing in the past? Two reasons:

1. Some friends who avoided my social networking platform of choice (Twitter) were resident on Facebook. I didn’t know Andy was in a relationship until Lee tweeted me and told me his Facebook relationship status had changed. Well I could hardly go on missing critical pieces of information like that could I?
2. The family trip to Australia contained a fair amount of ribbing of my Uncle for being a stick in the mud and social networking-aphobe. I could hardly maintain such a critique whilst maintaining a similarly high-handed view of Facebook. I should at least try it, with an open mind, and then draw final conclusions on its worth.

Sign up I did; then I spent a good few minutes looking at the screen and around the settings thinking ‘what next?’. Started adding a few friends, most of whom immediatly said, ‘What are you doing on here?’ and then over the next few days I started to get to grips with it and what I might use it for. I have been using it for about a week now and here are some initial positive and negatives.

Positives

• Keeping more in touch with friends who are not on Twitter.
• The iPhone application for it is really nicely put together and gives you access to more or less the full range of features.
• Tweetdeck, which I already used for Twitter, also integrates with Facebook, which allows me to simultaneously update Twitter and Facebook.
• It’s good that you can comment on all the different types of content that you can see from your friends, and that you can ‘tag’ friends into status updates.
• There is good integration with some other applications I use like Flickr, Qik and Audioboo, along with the facility through add on applications to run RSS feeds onto your page.

Negatives

• I find the entire interface very messy and confusing. Some of this is my own lack of understanding and familiarity with it, but for a novice Facebook does have several concepts that seem to overlap. There is your News Feed that can be viewed as the straight News Feed or the Live Feed, and contains the activity updates for you and your friends. There is then Status Updates, which is like a strimmed down version of the News Feed giving only, as the name suggests, Status Updates for yourself and your friends. However, not everything you do appears in your Live Feed; for example, if you happen to join a Group, this doesn’t appear in your News Feed (curiously if Friends join a Group it does), so you have to click into your Profile to see your recent Group joining history. That’s before I have even got to the messy world of Groups vs Pages and whatever the fuck Boxes are!
• It has an annoying habit of suggesting potential friends to you ALL the time. This easy access to mutual friends seems like a good idea at first when you initially want to add people, but does it have to do it all the time? When it is not suggesting friends to you, it decides it might try recommending Groups your Friends have joined instead: I am not interested OK?!
• Some of the applications you can add to your page are not altogether intuitive to get working. It took me a while to understand the setup of the Social RSS app for example, so I could ensure blog updates here flowed through to my Facebook page.
• Friend mining. I have not experienced this yet, but from chatting to people on there, due to these recommendations that get made about mutual friends, you can soon have people from your past turning up and requesting to be friends. These were people that you have the most tenuous associations with in alot of cases; quite often people who went to the same school as you or worked briefly in the same place. This entire process is supported by groups based around every school, all of which feel like complete Friends Reunited style nostalgia-fests.
• We all like our share of inane memes, but Facebook seems to produce them in large numbers in the form of bizarrely named Groups or Pages. I have seen ones with surreal names like, ‘Don’t You Just Hate It When You See Any Group That Starts Its Title With ‘Don’t You Just Hate It When..’ (well maybe not quite that, but you get the picture), which seem to attract thousands and thousands of people, whilst the official RSPB Group for example has a few hundred.

Twitter to Facebook is like comparing this:

Small, not particularly spectacular, but easily understandable and functional.

With this:

Complicated, with loads of unecessary bolt on parts, like it has been cooked up in the workshop of some mad professor.