My Facebook About-Face

You may remember that I posted some weeks ago about the ill-advisedness of adults using Facebook. Now that I am actually using Facebook, I would like to make known my total & complete retraction of my previous position. Facebook rules, and I plan to speak with my department head, fellow YA librarians in my system, and our tech department about setting one up for my library.

Why does Facebook rock so hard? A few reasons:

1. It is way, way easier to use and far less buggy than MySpace. I have a MySpace profile, but I am probably going to delete it because the site is so hard to use (for me, anyway -- this is obviously not a problem for the legions of users who remain devoted to it).
2. Facebook is so easy to customize -- not so much how it looks, but what it does. There are applications for every conceivable way you might want to customize your experience.
3. It is easier to find friends (both virtual & IRL ones), because signing up requires you to use your real name (or a close facsimile).
4. On the other hand, it's easier to remain anonymous, too -- you can set your profile to stay out of search results, and no-one can see your profile unless you agree to be friends with them or send them a message (and even then, you can set your preferences so that certain people can only see portions of your profile).
5. All in all, Facebook is a very useful way to develop and maintain loose connections with people (a type of relationship Malcolm Gladwell talks about in The Tipping Point) , and a way to nurture real-life relationships in a virtual space.