Time To Face The Book

April 9, 2007

After endless pestering from my friend Sarah, I’ve finally jumped on the Facebook bandwagon.

I’m not a huge fan of social networking sites, mostly as I’ve just been over exposed to them. From back in the day when my friends were on Campus Kiss, and then migrated to Friendster and MySpace and now they all seemed to have moved again… it’s just tiring trying to keep up.

Not that the sites don’t inform you of how many friends are just waiting for you to join. Nary a day goes by that I don’t get an e-mail from someone I haven’t spoken to in years (sometimes with good reason, sometimes not) asking me to join up to one of the endless supply of social sites now clogging the bandwidth.

Ryan McLaughlin's Facebook profile

That said, Sarah’s claims that Facebook was just plain slicker than MySpace or those others (actually, I doubt she said “slicker”, does anyone use “slick” anymore?) was not unfounded.

Within about 2 minutes I had auto-mined my Hotmail account for people on my Messenger list who were also on Facebook (being careful NOT to e-mail those that weren’t and invite them to join). Another five minutes after that I had searched through my college’s graduating year for people in my Journalism program and reconnected with a bunch of people I haven’t talked to since graduation.

I’ve also created two new Facebook groups for you all to join.

The first being for, oddly enough, expats in Suzhou. The second is in conjunction with my other site, Lost Laowai, and is for any expats in China (or laowai with an interest in China for that matter).

Another bonus to Facebook is that it works as an additional platform for introducing people to my blog – via links and an RSS import function. So, if you’ve come here from Facebook and are seeing the blog for the first time, please leave a comment.

If you’re a reader here and have a Facebook account – feel free to add me as a friend.

Professionals, read on…

Linked InHey, so if you’re a professional of some sort and have a LinkedIn account, please feel free to add me as a connection there. Tip of the hat to fiLi to hooking me up with this neat, professional alternative social networking site.

10 Responses

  1. I get the Facebook invites, too, and it is a bit tempting to join. I have a MySpace page, but it’s just not as much fun as the blog, and 90% of my time spent on it is cleaning out spam.

    I don’t touch Friendster. The only person of note who ever found me on that service was a guy who almost burned down my best friend’s house (whole family inside) as part of what he thought would be a clever prank. Fortunately, his pyrotechnic ability was about as evolved as his social skills. That was about the end of my Friendstering.

    Reply

  2. My wife just got onto the whole facebook thing.

    I haven’t made the jump and I don’t plan to. I don’t know about you, but I had been using IM and chatting programs back in 1994 when I was in university.

    When I started working in front of a computer full time, a bit later on, I decided to uninstall all those programs, because I was wasting too much time on them. There is no way to just get on your computer, as soon as you logged on, you were getting people talking to you via IM.

    Recently, about 7 years later, I installed some IM programs to chat with buddies from Canada.

    Reply

  3. Hey Michael, Sorry this isn’t related to social networking but something is wrong with my email client and I wanted to send a mail. I’m wondering if you are interested in working on a print magazine about Suzhou with me. I’m in the beginning stages so there is a lot to be decided still so if your interested we can meet up sometime to discuss. Can call me at 13914043674.

    Reply

  4. speaking of moving & migrating, I’ve shifted my blog over to a new URL & service, so it can be now found at http://my.opera.com/peoplesrepublicof/blog/

    please take a second to update your blog-roll. cheers, man!

    i’m another facebook noob, after using faceparty (years&years ago), then friendster (quit it last year), and now facebook seems to be the thing.

    Reply

  8. I found you looking for jobs in Dalian then noticed you are my friend on facebook and I am in your “new groups”. Personally, I can’t be bothered with the networking groups but I am not one to toy with fate, so Kudos and good to meet a fellow writer. I enjoy your blog immensly.

    Reply

  9. Ryan-

    “I’m not a huge fan of social networking sites”

    Sounds like you have been converted. Facebook will suck you in, just like all of us other alleged resisters.

    Reply

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