They say trying new things keeps your mind young. I should be in good shape, having recently ventured into two areas I was sure I'd never touch, finding them useless at best. One is Facebook, which I had classed—along with MySpace and LifeJournal—as boring, yet time-wasting websites for teenaged girls to gossip and bully each other, and for sexual predators to troll for victims. But Janet was invited to join by her oboe professor, so how could she say no? Then she had so much fun finding people with whom she'd lost contact that I decided to see what it was all about.
No doubt it is a good place for teenaged bullying and dangerous liasons, but it doesn't have to be, and I've been surprised at how many friends I've found or been found by already. I love sending Christmas letters, because it keeps us in contact with friends whose lives for the most part no longer intersect with ours. I sense that this logic has no appeal to the Facebook generation, which may never lose that contact. Perhaps the greatest danger (predators and bullies aside) is in being overwhelmed by trivial, shallow contact. The signal-to-noise ratio is rather poor. At least in a Christmas letter one is forced by space limitations to keep to the more important issues.I've been enjoying my Facebook experience so far, mostly for the contacts I've made with people. It will never replace this blog—I haven't yet figured out how to say something of substance there; I'm sure there's a way, but it's not obvious. And I doubt I'll get into many of the "applications" that abound; most seem like silly time-wasters to me. But so far it's been a good experience.
So, too, with my venture into another young persons' game: SMS, aka texting, aka sending text messages via my cell phone. I never saw the point, prefering either direct phone calls (faster, easier, clearer) or e-mails (definitely easier to type). But then Janet discovered that she can receive SMS's for free, and it suddenly became a great way to send her long-distance hugs. Short messages that don't need to have much substance, but tell her I'm thinking of her. I can send them when I'm away from my computer, and she doesn't have to wait to get home to her computer to receive them. I'm funny about it, though. I hate those texting abbreviations and refuse to send "u" for "you." I'm slowly being weaned from my need always to start sentences with upper case letters and to include all proper punctuation; I'll let that slip and will even abbreviate some wrds whn im in a hrry. But it pains me to do so, and thus I'm a very slow texter. So what? It still works for me.
However, today's Drabble was irresistable:
My mom's been having the same adventure. It led to a conversation about the relative merits of "predictive entry." That's where, instead of having to press keys multiple times to get certain letters, you just press once for each letter and eventually it guesses which word you're trying to spell (e.g. "which" would be "94424," not "944...4442244"). I find it much faster, and one upshot is that it becomes actually faster to spell correctly and fully. Plus, when you use a period, it automatically upper-cases the next letter for you. Mom and my girlfriend, though, are against it, and find it more frustrating when it guesses incorrectly or doesn't know the word you're typing. I still find it worth it, though.
I've played with predictive entry a little, but so far am mostly in agreement with your mom (are you surprised?) and your girlfriend. Apparently I'm not predictable enough. I do like the idea of it automatically capitalizing after periods, though.
Entering text via a phone's numeric pad is way too tedious for me. I think I might actually like the ability to send text messages if phones had a decent text input device.
I have to say, it's funny getting a text message from my Mom. In fact, the only two real messages I've gotten on my phone were from her, and her first one I thought was "spam" until I looked a little more closely.
I don't care how you write it. I love hearing from you!
(a) Death to Facebook applications.
(b) I'm with Andy. The predictive input also learns with time, as you add to the dictionary, so every now and then I'm tempted to try to retrain a language to Swiss German, but then I always think the better of it because of the boatload of work involved.
Well, I like Facebook applications simply because people (well, one guy so far) hire Jon to write them...
I doubt I will join. I have a hard enough time keeping email and blogs to a reasonable amount of time consumed.
One nice thing is that it's possible to join and use it minimally. You can get e-mail notifications so you don't have to check Facebook itself, and you can control (supposedly) what you're notified about. The ads on Facebook itself are a little more annoying than I thought they would be. I can easily ignore the ones on the sidebar, but "sponsored news" shows up in my news feed, too, and -- unlike other kinds of news -- you can't tell Facebook not to show you those.
But it's chief value, I think, is in finding people. The network explosion is amazing.
To me, the main question is -- is it really worthwhile getting in touch with long-lost people? The obvious answer is yes...but as you point out, our time is limited, and are we doing anyone any favors by so greatly expanding our network? As they said about the telegraph, "But do Maine and Texas have anything to say to each other?"
