Brian, do you only value those things in life which provide you with solutions to problems? Facebook may or may not have value for you - and may or may not solve a problem for you - but that is up for you to decide, should you wish to play around with it. For me, it’s a bit of fun and makes me feel more connected to the diaspora of my worldwide social circle.

Facebook is a slightly paradoxical place. It only becomes useful if lots of your friends are on there. So, unless many of your friends are already using it, there’s no point in you being there, and thus no point in them being there…

That said, I’m slowly being sucked into Facebook and, as Jackie suggests, it is a low maintenance way of keeping in touch with a lot of people.

Biran, you are right (as ever.)

I have read the Paul Allen (the lesser) guff which you linked to “facebook”. he tells you what a great idea it is and also how it is going to make him a really really large amount of money (him) (as we say here in the North.)

But he does NOT say what it is for; only that it is “going to be awesome” - no of course he doesn’t in so many words - but I have “back-translated” into ThatcherMajor-1991-Transitional-Business-Dialect-Herbalife-NuSkin-pyramid-selling-management-speak; a language that is the only one this Paul Allen (not the real one, then!) seems to understand.

I think, talking to my students, who are often my Windows on the Modern World, that it is for them to pick up sex partners on. I don’t think it is for anybody else at all.

Or I may be totally, irremediably wrong. But I don’t think so. Prince William went on it almost as soon as he dumped poor Kate Middleton, for being too posh for his sort. he got 44 “friends” on his first day, not a very good start you might think, but then he is disadvantaged (his brother at least is senior to him in the Army) and his mother was worse than that.

David Davies, the story about Prince William you cite is a hoax that the Daily Mail bought into. It is not true.

You also say:

“I think, talking to my students, who are often my Windows on the Modern World, that it is for them to pick up sex partners on. I don’t think it is for anybody else at all.”

The first part may be true of your students, but your second sentence is complete rubbish. Why do you believe this? More to the point, why do you WANT to believe it? Are those of us who tell you that we use Facebook and aren’t using it to find sex partners simply liars? Am I a liar?

This pontificating about the internet from people who do not know of what they speak would not wind me up so much if the people speaking did not always seem to have such rotten, nasty things to say.

Jackie
Firstly, you have spelt my name wrongly. (As I get older, it matters more. Why? it just does.)

Secondly, how do you know that I am not the Shadow-Home-Secretary!?

Thridly, you have not fully read my post. I also wrote; “Or, I may be totally, irremediably wrong”. Did I say that or not? I can see it right there above me now.

Fourthly, you do not know any of my students.

David, I’m sorry I spelled your name wrong, realizing immediately after I had published my comment that I had done so. If I could edit it, I would have.

No, I do not know any of your students. And...? I didn’t make any accusations against them, did I?

Capping off insulting views with a caveat that “I may be totally, irremediably wrong” is not some polite way of being jerky. It’s just being jerky.

David, my guess is that your mother was a prostitute. I may be totally, irremediably wrong, though!

See? Doesn’t work.

I expect better manners from of Brits, especially those (like you, David) whose ideas I generally agree with and consider one of the good guys.

This pontificating about the internet from people who do not know of what they speak would not wind me up so much if the people speaking did not always seem to have such rotten, nasty things to say.

All these articles about blogging shrillness and the declining of the standards of public discourse are evidently rubbish then.

Give us the number of your charm school Jackie.

Very glad you consider me a “good guy”, Jackie! I am really pleased about that.

The “Paul Allen” which was speaking, didn’t really tell us anything ABOUT Facebook and what need it serves in the people that presumably someone had done homework about before launching it, did he. He just wanted to tell us about what a phenomenon is “is going to be”, in a one-dimensional commercial sense for those in the know. This to me sounds just like what socialism does. It tells you how marvellous the Planners are going to make your miserable lives at some time after the end of the latest “5-year-plan”. They don’t say how, either, do they! Get my point?

David, I think it would be helpful if Paul Allen’s views on this were disregarded. They do not matter. What matters is what individuals like me find and are able to create with Facebook for themselves. (Hint: For this betrothed girl, it’s not sex partners, no matter what you might say or like to believe of me.)

Mark Zuckerberg (who just turned 23 recently) started Facebook as a student at Harvard, as a tool for himself and university students. His “homework” was his life and the needs he identified in himself, his friends, and his fellow students. This is an age where any individual can create something of massive impact, like Facebook, without much money or a big corporate backer. (This is something to be celebrated.)

Paul Allen’s piece is very insider-y, written for a tech/social media-savvy readership. There are a lot of lines he’s not filling in, but I can’t blame him for that.

Primarily, it is an aggregator for my contacts and an aggregator of information about what they are up to and how their lives may be changing (in the last week, I’ve found out that two friends are getting divorced when Facebook told me they’d changed their marital status on their profiles). As one blogger (Dare Obsanjo) says, Facebook is so hugely popular because it “enable[s] people to connect, communicate and share with each other in richer and easier ways than blogging does.”

Frankly, I don’t know why one would be afraid of that.

Personally, I am not attached to any outcomes for Facebook. Right now, it’s an interesting, fun tool that helps me keep in closer touch with friends all over the world, lets me get to know them better in some cases, and lets me play around with some neat software. Something better might come along someday, in which case, great! I am not in this for the sake of Facebook, but - like its other 24 million+ active users - for the sake of what it does for me.

I’m with you on this one. I don’t have a facebook profile yet and when some friends asks for my facebook profile so that they can add me, i can remeber the look when I say i dont have one