Fascination Place

So I joined Facebook yesterday. Giving in to subtle social pressure, I guess. But I don’t yet (or, if you prefer, still don’t) see what the big attraction is.

At least Facebook actually let me join. When I tried to join MySpace a couple of years ago they, well, technically they let me join, too, but something went wrong with the account set-up and I was never able to edit my account: Any changes I made were immediately lost. I couldn’t even delete the account and start over! And MySpace has (or had, at the time) nonexistent user support: I wrote them twice asking for help, and all they did was send me back entries from their FAQ that I’d already read. Useless.

What do I expect to get out of Facebook? Honestly, I have no idea. I mainly use the so-called “social media” for two purposes:

1. To keep in touch with friends.
2. To follow writers I find interesting or who are writing about subjects I enjoy.

For the most part, I get all of this through the blogs I follow (and I follow dozens of them), including LiveJournal, which has pretty much shown itself to be the best one-stop-shopping site for keeping up with friends and acquaintances.

I can count the number of times I’ve gone to sites like Digg on my fingers. I have a Twitter account which I use sporadically, but Twitter just doesn’t provide much depth or a decent signal-to-noise ratio. (Debbi sometimes teases me about Twittering when we’re out-and-about, but really I’m not very active there. Not compared to many people.)

So anyway, Facebook: I imagine I might encounter a few old acquaintances there, but honestly I’m already in touch with most of my old friends through e-mail and the Web. The mere existence of the Internet turned out to be the 90% solution for that. But maybe I’ll be surprised.

So Facebook might just end up being another account I created that ends up laying fallow. But hey, at least it’s free.

I decided to search for my name on the new search engine, Cuil (pronounced “cool”). The results were disappointing: The top hit was to my old web page, and the rest of the first page were either blogs I had commented on, or who had me in their blogroll. But this blog? Doesn’t show up.

Fail.

A few weeks ago I gave in to peer pressure and joined Twitter. You can find me there under mrawdon. Okay, I wasn’t really being pressured, but I’d several of my cow-orkers were hanging out there making pithy remarks, so I decided to sign up.

I’ve joked that Twitter is “like blogging only without the pesky content”. I’ve also seen it called “microblogging”, which I take to mean, “There is content, but there isn’t very much of it.” Which seems about right: I see little tidbits of real content here and there, but most of Twitter consists of tiny, generic snippets of thought which are either devoid of depth, or devoid of meaning due to a lack of context.

It’s the lack of context that really makes Twitter a suboptimal experience compared to blogging: If I didn’t know the people I’m following personally, there’d be essentially nothing there for me. So it’s no surprise that the few times I’ve tried to go out and find new Twitterers to follow, I’ve come up empty because it’s all just random nattering without any context to give it meaning, or any depth to give it value in the absence of that context. (By contrast, I’ve found many fine journals and blogs over the years simply by poking around in one place or another on the Web, even if I didn’t know the author beforehand.)

If I were to use a single word to sum up Twitter, I think it would be “disposable”. It’s hard enough to build anything of lasting value in a blog format, and it looks to be nearly impossible on Twitter. I don’t expect to become educated or informed through Twitter, and I strongly doubt there’s anything of interest in “the archives”. Will I ever go back to look at my old tweets to recall what was, like I do with my journal? Probably not. I wonder whether anyone else does so with their tweets?

Clearly a lot of people are having fun on Twitter, though. A tool like Twitteriffic turns Twitter into something like a push-notification system, which means less effort on your part to keep up with what your friends are doing. (This isn’t very different from following a blog via an RSS feed, though.) But it seems like most of the fun is in following the snarky remarks and exchanges and the occasional raw outbursts that pepper the site.

So there’s some value in that; people have fun and get a few laughs. But there’s a lot of fun and plenty of laughs elsewhere in the world, and a lot of it is more rewarding when it’s not restricted to 140 characters.

So I took a few minutes to learn how to use Dreamhost’s built-in stats package to see who’s hitting my Web site where. (I’ve also been using StatCounter for this, but naturally my hosting service can provide a much more complete picture.)

Having done that, I noticed that several of my images are being hotlinked from other sites. While I’m not really anywhere close to using my bandwidth allocation (not within an order of magnitude – maybe two), hotlinking is just obnoxious on principle. So I took a few more minutes to learn how to block hotlinks.

Useful Web trickery, all learned in just a few minutes. (Dreamhost has a really useful Wiki for learning these things.)

I wonder what else I ought to learn in this space?

(I should probably see about blocking hotlinks to my old site, too.)