Everyone is on Facebook. Or so it seems. Its meteoric rise in popularity has been met by an equally meteoric fall in its usefulness. Facebook is overcrowded and is fast becoming the new myspace. A total and utter waste of everyones time.
If you search for yourself on Facebook you will almost certainly run into hundreds, if not thousands, of other people, all with the same or similar name. And, since Facebook is attracting the myspace crowd of kids, spammers, and time-wasters you can guarantee that anyone looking for you will probably get fed up with looking at idiotic photographs of people trying to look cool, give up and try to contact you directly to ask for your Facebook address. How depressingly ironic. In trying to find you, people have to contact you by a more reliable means that they probably already regularly use.
The killer punch is painfully obvious. Delete your Facebook account now and stop generating page views and advertising revenues for someone else.
The only way to really stand out on Facebook is to have nothing to do with it.
Backup your contacts first if you want to but chances are you are already in contact with the people who you want to network with.
Extending your social network and making new contacts can be done much more easily and a lot more effectively by blogging. If you want to extend your social network then start a blog and blog about things that interest you. To extend your business contacts start a blog and blog about your business.
It’s not rocket science. Get a good host, pick a domain name (a good host will give you one for free), install wordpress (a good host will do all of this for you), and off you go.
Once you have your own blog you are in control, not someone else. Don’t blend in with the Facebook masses. Delete your Facebook account today.
As a student, Facebook is NOT something I use to build my social network. It’s how I keep in contact with people I already know. I can easily send messages to people, look at and share photos and plan events. This would be much harder using a disparate collection of other websites, or by email.
@Matt - rather then give your clicks away to facebook, you could just as easily install one of the dozens of platforms that do the same thing. then you have a personalized site, you control the information and you might even make a buck.
i tried, but everyone i know is either too lazy, too complacent or too simple to start another site. i can name like 6 platforms put facebook to shame. but people are sheep: they use facebook and myspace because they haven’t the imagination to do otherwise.
I’ve never really understood the draw of social networking sites like Myspace or Facebook. Admittedly, I did create a Myspace account at the height of its popularity (before it was acquired by News Corp). I was hounded by spam and “friend requests” from people who were only trying to expand their friends list.
It quickly became apparent to me that the entire concept of online “social networking” is flawed. At least, in the way it’s been implemented so far. However, like Matt said, a blog is not a logical replacement. It’s a clever idea, but there’s a lot of footwork involved in making contacts through a personal website or blog. The entire purpose of these networking sites is to cut that chore out.
MySpace, Facebook, and others have their place. It’s obvious by the number of users. Sheep, probably, but if you think of these networks as an advertising platform, then these people are no more sheep than anyone who has ever bought anything they saw advertised on television.
I hate Facebook; I really do. The only reason I set up an account there was because I’m a student and it is “the thing to do”.
That being said, last week, the boss of a company I did part-time work for joined Facebook and added me as a friend. A few days later, he offered me an interview for a job (as I’m graduating this summer), through Facebook messages.
Maybe Facebook isn’t all that bad?
Facebook is nothing more than fake intimacy. I found that after a while communication became nothing more that pokes and one liners. What ever happened to just calling a person and hearing a voice. Guess I sound like old man, then good.