[ALUG] Facebook

[samwise]

On 08/07/07, Wayne Stallwood <ALUGlist at digimatic.co.uk> wrote:

> I must say at this point I am wondering what all the fuss is about and
> already some brokenness has bugged me.

The real value of the site, is the connections with other people you
know using the site - it's like a big directory.  If it takes off as
well as friendsreunited.co.uk did, you stand a chance of finding old
friends without paying the fr. utd. annual charge.  :)  If the bugs
and american-isms are really grating, you can always refer people to
your email address off-line, if someone hunts you down through it.
There's no killer features and stuff, over and above it's value as a
directory, AFAICT, though - you can do all the photo sharing and IMing
junk without the need of the site.

> I have found a couple of people at previous places of employment, and
> their profiles say they worked there, but when I try and search for that
> company to find more friends it returns no results.

> It isn't obvious how you add a company or a regional network. My Home
> town does not have a regional network and only one of the companies I
> have worked at seem to have one.

This seems to be a major drawback and might cost them users over here
- it's still very US-centric and there's only about five major UK
cities listed, which is rubbish.  I don't want to sign up as a London
member when I clearly live 100 miles away!  The unclear process for
sorting that out and setting up a definitive network for a company
(particularly when you no longer work there, and therefore don't have
an active email address for that company's domain name) are real
issues, I think.  Originally, you couldn't use the site at all without
a university email account - they broadened the scope, but there's
still a lot of silly limitations in place.

> Maybe once I have built up my networks a bit I will start to see the
> point but at the moment....feh

Make sure all your contact information is up to date, add your
secondary school, college, universities and places of work ... then
search for any groups like ALUG or other interests ... join them and
then just see what happens.  Search occasionally for old friends and
you'll be surprised who crops up.  And once you've found one, it's
easy to find others by searching through their friends lists ...

You do have to put up with all the annoying cr*p requests like people
biting you to make you a Zombie ... that stuff, unfortunately, seems
to go hand in hand with web 2.0 sites.  :)

Of course, once you've re-established contact with peeps from your
past ... I'm not sure whether there's going to be much of a long-term
reason to keep coming back to it.  I suspect not, and once the flash
in the pan has faded, everyone will move on to something else.

On 08/07/07, MJ Ray <mjr at phonecoop.coop> wrote:

> As Planet ALUG readers will know, I've recently joined LinkedIn and
> been fairly impressed with how easy it is to use, if a little slow.
> I'll write more on the web as I get further with it, I expect.  I'm
> also on SoFlow, which can be interesting in its forums, but hasn't
> done much for me so far and has a few accessibility problems.

I read that a lot of LinkedIn users were slowly moving over to
Facebook, though I don't know how much truth there is in that.
Certainly, the idea of being contacted by a lot of business contacts
hasn't convinced me that I want to sign up to it as well yet.  :)

Not heard of SoFlow before ... is that a business-centric one?  Is
there anything unique to it?

Peter.