Tuning in to Facebook
When I was a kid, my family would go to my Grandparents’ house every month or so. There wasn’t a lot to do there in Newcastle, Nebraska (pop. 312), but one of my favorite things to do was to dust off my Grandpa’s short-wave radio and tune in whatever happened to be broadcasting at the time. It was an amazing portal to far-away places, with professional, amateur, foreign and domestic broadcasts weaved through electronic blips and bleeps fading in and out of the static at each slight touch of the dial.
There were people out there who had something to say, not that I could understand half of it, - but it was fascinating.
In the same way, my initial introduction to the web way-back-when struck the same chord, and my first thought was, “How do I participate in this?” (The answer : Bum a “Teach yourself HTML” book from Sydney, and find a server. No free blogging platforms in 1995, unfortunately.)
I never gave much thought about Facebook. After playing around with Friendster and MySpace, I tuned out. There really wasn’t room in my life for another buddy-counting site. Beyond the benefit (?) of a public display of having twelve or fifteen friends, there wasn’t much networking in the ’social networking’ space for me. I knew how to get in touch with the people I needed to get in touch with, and they knew how to get in touch with me.
After reading Scoble’s recent enthusiasim for Facebook, not to mention some good coverage at Webware I decided to create my own account and start playing around, and I am impressed.
Beyond the buddy-building ego-stroaking basics, Facebook has unlimited groups and a growing number of applications which make it a much richer, and more customizable experience than the other sites.
So, I added the CNET Facebook app (natch), and LastFM, twitter, MyFlickr, and del.icio.us apps. I added myself to the Minutemen, and Our Band could be your Life groups, and added a slew of friends.
I’m now importing these blog posts as Facebook notes, and today I set up the Google reader shared items app. (thanks for the tip, Robert!).
So, now what?
Now I am relatively hooked-in to Facebook with the sites and applications I use daily, and hopefully, my broadcasting into Facebook-space will be transparent from my end. I’m less interested in putting energy into building up an address book full of high-school and college acquaintances, but much more interested to see how the integrations will work for me, while I do what I’d do normally.
We’ll see.
Am I the media? If you define that as broadcasting as efficiently as possible, then, yes.
I’m looking forward to see who might tune-in.
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