• HauntedCryme
    +2

    I am frequently confused by Facebook. I am mostly on it because you can't seem to live at University and not have a Facebook profile, and be semi-active on it, and yet I don't understand why they have such a monopoly on life. I guess it offers a variety of tools for managing friendships, and because it had these and was good a few years ago, everyone has facebook, so it doesn't require signing up to different/better services.

    For example, if I want to organise an outing to the pub, I'll make a facebook event and invite my friends, purely because all of my friends are on there and can see who else is going/organise/discuss plans. It makes friendships and organisation a lot less painful, yet the timeline has been slowly growing less and less friend-oriented to crap-oriented - most of the posts on my timeline are from "Best of Tumblr" and "The Lad Bible", even though I don't like either of these pages.

    • exikon
      +2

      It's really great to organise things with people that you're not exactly close to. For example, our year at uni has a facebook group and people ask questions, put solutions to old exams on there or organise events. I dont have most of these even as friends on facebook and yet I can reach pretty much everybody out of my year nearly instantly. I dont really check my newsfeed much though.

      • HauntedCryme
        +2

        Definitely. Our course also has a group per year (unofficial, but one seemingly always gets made), and we've found out quite a few things this way. The collective brain is always good. Without Facebook, I doubt this would have happened anywhere else in such an organised way.