I’ve hit a lull with work. Not much has been going on although there is tons to do. Recently I’ve been playing around with Facebook.com. Facebook.com is the third web based networking website that provides a networking platform and interface to link friends and associates. Friendster was the first, then Myspace and now Facebook. Facebook is today’s hype.

Now I’ve been slow in getting on the bandwagon of these cyberspace phenomena. When Friendster hit, I didn’t get it. I know I signed up with an account and had some friends on it but I never used it. So I never really explored its capabilities and what it may offer as a networking tool. It seemed a little abstract for me. I could never really see myself reaching out to strangers or friends of friends on some loose social connection.

Then Myspace hit. This caught on quickly. People seem to love the ability to customize their profile pages adding music, graphics and pictures allowing them to express how cool they are. I kind of liked this idea in theory and set up a page. However, I didn’t really feel like learning the intricacies of setting up the code to customize my page. I do that for my personal website and as you see with my blog, I am perfectly happy with using preprogrammed page themes that are limited in their aesthetic because their function takes priority. Myspace has given birth to a kind of visual anarchy that makes it difficult for me to even view friends and friends of friends’ pages. Also, I never really felt like writing on the walls of their pages and used the internal messaging functions rarely. Again it became another network tool that seemed frivolous and useless to me.

But now there is Facebook. Facebook is a network that I’m exploring more. This is because it is designed in away giving the user less choice in aesthetic but with functionality that is better suited for my purposes. In it’s function it provides a news feed that allows friends to passively promote as well as be updated with the activities of other friends in their network. For me this function is key. Now when I post a blog such as this one in which I feel does not merit a mass email to all my friends and associates, I now have a place that I can syndicate it to those in my network.

Now on another note, I was speaking to a friend of mine and he had told me that Home Land Security and the NSA where directly involved with development of Facebook. This maybe true. Remember… Big Brother is always watching!