Did you see my status update?

The first blog prompt on the list-o-prompts I’m trying to use is, “How I use Facebook.”  I resisted signing up for Facebook for quite a while when it first became the big thing.  I endured endless harassment from Erin that I needed to create a profile and finally gave up because I knew that was the only way I would get her to be quiet about it.  It also became the best way to communicate with her and replaced our once daily emails! 

Since that time I have had a love/hate relationship with the social networking site.  In the beginning I logged in every once in a while to poke someone or throw a president at them.  Or maybe both.  Then as more people began to join and my network grew I logged in daily to see what everyone was up to.  Cyber stalking, if you will.  And then something terrible happened...  Someone invited me to join Mafia Wars.  Sadly I was sucked in like the millions of others who have become addicted to this mindless, pointless, never-ending game.  There literally is no end to it.  You can't ever finish it.  After that came FarmVille, Café World, Treasure Mania, that other one that was like FarmVille, Farkle, some sort of see-how-fast-you-can-type game, and others.  I wish I could reclaim all the time I spent playing them.  I wish I had seen them for the marketing ploy they were.  Though I will proudly say that I never once spent REAL money on in-game play.  I may have whored out my email address a few times for some bonus offers of farm cash or godfather points, but Facebook never saw my credit card.

Once I was playing the games, checking my news feed became an addiction.  I HAD to know what my friends (and acquaintances) were up to.  If I missed a chunk of time I would go back and keep reading until I was caught back up.  I got a little perturbed with family members if they didn’t know about something that was going on in my life because, duh, I posted it on Facebook...  Why didn’t you see my status update?  I consider that a low time in my life.

Slowly as I got busier with photography I stopped playing the games and spent more time editing photo sessions.  I blocked one game application and it felt good... no more stress about making sure my flowers were watered or harvested.  No more being sad because my friends didn’t come to fertilize my crops.

Now all of the games are blocked.  I think I’ve finally managed to hide all of the game apps from appearing in my news feed, and any time someone sends me a new teddy bear it’s ignored without the slightest bit of guilt.  Oh, and if someone answers a question about me?  I don’t care.  Answer all the questions you want about whether I'm cute or you have a crush on me.  I'm just going to assume you said good things because we're friends and you posted that you answered it on my wall and how crappy would it be for you to bring my attention to a mean answer. 

Honestly, if it weren’t for the fact that Facebook has been my primary source of advertising I probably would have already deleted my profile altogether.  I rarely ever post a status update and when I do it’s more like using Facebook as a resource to answer a question or share an opportunity with people.  (Or yesterday to vent about the systematic raping of State employees' salaries, after which I was reminded why I don't ever EVER get involved in political discussions on Facebook.)  I do enjoy the photo aspect of it and seeing my friends’ photos, but I have my reservations about Facebook’s terms of use when it comes to my own copyright.  So I rarely upload any pictures I haven’t watermarked.  It’s a pain.  And for a while I had to take an additional step of resizing my images before I could upload them because of Facebook’s compression...  It made all of my pictures look craptastic, and that’s not good when I’m using it as a source of advertising. 

So for now I’m still on Facebook.  I’m careful about how I use it.  I think that has to be the case with anything on the internet...  You must be careful and look out for yourself because you can’t expect anyone else to look out for anything but their own best interest.  If that means making money off of your information (in Facebook’s case it does), then they’re going to do it.  Facebook isn’t there just to make us happy...  It exists to generate revenue for someone.

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