I have finally sucked it up and joined Facebook. As a reasonably avid surfer and someone who has been active online since dial up modems were all the rage, I became aware of Facebook when it first came out, but decided at the time that it wasn't for me.
Why?
Well, I was already maintaining a blog of my own albeit intermittently, and was wondering what Facebook could really offer me.
I was (and still am) receiving hundreds of emails a day from both work and my personal contacts.
I was (and still am) kept busy with my work commitments, family life and existing hobbies.
How was I possibly going to have time to keep up with all my existing correspondence, plus keep my profile/status/whatever up to date? I was hearing horror stories of Facebook junkies who felt the need to update their status every hour of the day, even resorting to using their mobile phones to update their status while stuck in traffic, waiting for the bus, or even sitting on the toilet.
Please...
As you can imagine, despite my best efforts to ignore Facebook, I kept hearing about it. If I had a dollar for every person who asked me why I wasn't on Facebook yet...well let's just say I wouldn't need to work. Some of my friends know I'm a bit of a geek and so it was often assumed that I must have been on Facebook.
I've managed to resist, up to the end of last week. What changed?
When I was travelling in China and Taiwan earlier this month, I was with one of my business partners, who is also a geek. I realised through our discussion that he was on Facebook, yet I knew that he was also incredibly busy, and didn't have the spare time to do everything else he wanted to do, let alone keep his profile or status up to date. I remembered how he used to be an IM junkie and kicked the habit because it was simply taking up too much of his time.
He explained that he didn't use it to regularly tell the world how he was feeling. It simply served as a place where people could find him. I assumed he meant the often quoted example of long lost school friends. When asked, he said it did provide that, but for him it was more around customers. Clients who you may have had some business with a long time ago, but for whatever reason the business falls over and you lose touch. Facebook served as another place where someone trying to track him down could do a search and find his basic contact details and get in touch again.
I thought about this some more, and so I decided to join Facebook.
The verdict so far is that I can see the benefit. While most of my incoming inquiries until now have been long lost school friends, I have had a couple of old clients come through, so it has made itself worthwhile already.
I still can't help but think it is a little overhyped, and I would encourage anyone who wants to get somewhere in business not to get too personal on Facebook, because posting photos of you partying hard on weekends semi naked is probably not going to help you land that senior position somewhere one day.
But if you need to ensure people who you haven't seen for a while can track you down for work or for pleasure, you could do a lot worse than a minimalist Facebook membership.
It appears to be working for me.
Later.
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