I’ve resisted for a long time, but I’ve finally done it. I now have a Facebook page. I came across my nephew Chip’s Facebook profile while looking at his blog, and through it had discovered that most of my nieces and nephews as well as two of my sisters were on there. The clencher was that there was a “Taylor Clan” group for Facebook, so I decided I needed to be a part of that.
I’ve never really gotten into the whole Facebook/MySpace social networking thing. It’s hard enough to keep up with blogging, much less all these other things. I set up my profile so that it reads the RSS feeds from my Flickr, Twitter, and WordPress accounts, so I don’t have to do anything extra to keep the profile updated.
I can appreciate some of the networking aspects. In addition to my family, I’ve reconnected with one friend from high school and one from college. It’s also curious to see who is suggested as a friend in the “People you might know” feature of the site. So far my friend requests have been to and have come from people I really do know. I’m just waiting for the really oddball or spam requests to start rolling in.
One thing that has kept me from creating a profile so far are all of the silly little applications that you can add – bumper stickers, flair, etc., etc., etc. These are just updated versions of the dancing baloney that used to pollute web pages of the 1990’s (and apparently still does, in some cases.) If you send me some of this junk and I don’t respond to it on Facebook, it doesn’t mean that I don’t like you any less (in most cases). It just means that I don’t really have time for it.