Fuddled by Facebook

Or frazzled? Flummoxed? Frelled? Flustered?

Yes, it *is* pre-coffee, so bear with me. I'll try to toss back a swallow or two as I go. Though I don't know that it will make me any more coherent...

So, Facebook was born. A long time ago, (well, okay some indeterminate long time ago in my memory) I even checked it out. A friend had mentioned they were on it. It had got some airtime on CBC. (So it must be real!) So I went to look it out.
I think it was a bit different early on, because I couldn't really figure it out. I couldn't seem to make it do much. And whatever ID I set up, I didn't write down. duh...

Anyway, at the beginning of this year, a dear friend asked me to check out her Facebook profile, so back I went. Yes, you have to be involved enough to set up an ID to even look at things you're invited to look at... So I set up an ID. (This time I wrote it down!) And looked at her profile. Noticed with amusement, how many mutual old friends had popped out of the woodwork. Poked her. (I love the "poke" function. It suits my sense of the absurd.) Sent a message or two.
But....and here's the first big but in all of this. It worked like sludge. Every action took forever. (And we've already switched to satellite, remember? Admittedly, it's pretty sad satellite, but we're paying through the nose for it, simply because our dial up barely supports phone conversations these days!) It took so long to sign in, or change screens that I was forever asking myself, did I hit enter?

And pretty much anything I went to do, required me to sign in and join up for whatever widget, and quite apart from the amount of time it was taking to even get to those screens, I'm sorry, I just wasn't interested in going that far. Sure, I'd love to know my friend's secret stripper name, or send her back a 'flower for her virtual garden', or see how she did in the movie trivia quiz, but I've no interest in adding these widgets to my Facebook page. I don't use my Facebook page as it is.

After four months I finally got as far as adding a picture, and mentioning the theatre, just so it didn't look totally question-mark-y. I don't have much else to say.
I can send email to my friends far more simply. I don't have to log in to do it. My email gets turned on at the beginning of the day. I click on their address, I type as long or as short a message as I want. And queue it. Whenever I want I can hit send, and my outmail goes, and my new inmail arrives. Ta da!

When I have random thoughts, I can come over and jot them down. Long or short, with pictures or without. And I can also make notes to myself here (like which cookbook that marvellous sesame and green bean dish was in, and when I should be heading off to check on wild leeks.) Actually, the picture posting aspect of blogs is far more useful and interesting. My useful herby friends can tell me it really is woad (when I'm too stupid to be sure.) I can lust after Grondzilla's irises. And admire Karen's new header image.

So, on wieldiness points alone, the 'blob' wins.

But the latest bizzarity with the Facebook phenomenon is that all of a sudden I have people asking me to be their friend. Sure, some of them are already friends in the greater scheme of things. We already chat to some degree. But then, there are other people. People I know only marginally. People I've barely shared a half dozen mini-conversations with in my life! People I might not even pick out of a crowd.
Now that's weird.

I understand the mechanic. Now that I've allowed myself to be 'friends' with a couple of other people, because it seemed harmless, if ineffective, there's a coagulation of 'people I know' and 'people they know'. So friends of friends can see my existence.

Sure, that works for me, too! I can look at someone's list of friends and say to myself, well lookee there! So and so has Facebook. Do I see any point of doing anything about it? Not really. I suppose it suggests to me who I might ask about email addresses, if and when I'm suddenly filled with the urge to get in contact...
But beyond that? Hence, it seems highly weird that these people now want to be my friends here, in the online world, when they might not know me from a hole in the ground in the real world. (Though another friend did suggest it's way to get to know me better in the 'safety' of Facebook... Actually, I'd say come read the 'blob', there's far more of the real me here!)

Sadly, maybe this is nature's way of pointing out to me that I'm finally achieving fuddy-duddiness. That I'm too old a dog to change spots. (Is that even the metaphor?)

Maybe it's telling me I'm too old to remember trite whatyamahusits that I can't even remember the word for... sigh.

Maybe life is telling me I need more coffee!

v