Crackbook

I remember not too long ago laughing at one of my students bemoaning his ill-fated turn when his wife got hooked on Mixi. Japan, like other countries has started getting hooked on the social networking sites recently. I thought it was a silly endeavour- I had tried getting onto My Space before and thought it was nothing more that a glorified meat-market website.

About a month or so ago, a friend of mine sent out an invite to join Facebook- the latest Social Networking craze in the English community. While skeptical, I was in the mood to try out something new so I signed up to give it a whir. My first impression was quite negative however. They immediately ask you to give them your e-mail address and password to send out invites to all the people in your address book. I have seen a number of websites that use this style of proliferating and have pretty much as a rule stayed away from these sites. In this day and age where security concerns and privacy concerns are talked about daily- I can't believe that people will willingly give their password to a website like that, if the website has a malicious owner you could be opening the door to a potential world of trouble. However I had been reading a lot about Facebook in my daily tech news, so I knew they were on the level. I searched out the "skip this step" button and joined up.

Since I didn't use the E-mail option I found the best way to find contacts is to look for them in your friend's contact lists or run a search (you can search by regional network, your high school, or job place) for people you haven't heard from in a long time.

The interface for Facebook is impressive, as they opened up their interface to 3rd party modules, you can easily customize your Facebook space to have all the options that you think that can be fun. You can share video files, or pinpoint on a map places you have been, or you can just join in on a Facebook-wide Food Fight. The user base is also impressive and seemingly growing at an alarming rate (it seems like everyone else is a new user as well).

One function I thought was quite nice is it is very easy to share your personal pictures with your friends only. I had tried to share some pictures with Flickr previously, but people only seemed to use it to look at my pictures, so whenever I put new pics up they couldn't remember their log-in info. Flickr has smartly added a 3rd party app to Facebook you can share those pictures in the social site as well.

Well after an initial love affair with the site, I have at times found my interest waning, but I guess this is why people have been calling it "crackbook" (named wittily by combining the name of a highly addictive drug and the name of the site), is that the 3rd party add-ons provide a lot of fun ways to interact with other people, so I am almost daily getting e-mail reminders that I have something to look at.

My constant wariness of time wasters and trying to get myself on the path to productivity has met another foe. Curse you Facebook!