Web In Depth

The first time I learned about Facebook is from my friends. (Not really I have heard about it before, during a CNN news broadcast which described this college-based application that was going global. but I only recognized that fact after my second introduction to it) But I never paid any attention then, as I haven’t really heard about social media back then. This is not surprising, as I am in Sri Lanka, and we are just now getting good affordable broadband connections that are a necessity, for a good web 2.0 experience. The earlier dial-up had two main problems of been too expensive and too slow.

Anyway to continue with the story; about middle of this year I noticed a definite change in the daily routines of my friends. I could see they were doing something with this site called facebook and came to appreciate two characteristics in there behavior

1. They were not even interested in speaking with others and spend more time on Facebook than I deemed necessary.

2. Every time they had some free time they rushed to log back into facebook.

I was introduced to this new format of building the community called facebook and was not impressed, because I always had a conviction that most of the applications running on computers or Web were just time wasters that probably made hordes of money for the creators and initiators, but gave nothing back to the users. My belief is further exemplified by seen how everyone was playing this game on facebook of shooting each other. Now needless to say, I am not a big fan of computer games either because of the above said beliefs( I will write a separate posts on the evil of the web, please don’t have any doubt that there is evil out there and we need to get together to stop it and make the Web a truly wonderful place). So I resisted all attempts by my friends to get me to join, although they did attempt with some very high praise for the system.

But two things change my mind on using facebook.

1 As a good friend pointed out, this is the cool way to keep track of my old school friends, and my and college friends when I leave for a job. As I was mid way through my final semester this sounded like a very logical idea.

2. I have been interested in making money online, and have for some time wondered if something like facebook can be a good place to build a community or find a market. Although I have seen a lot of people talk on traffic from Digg and StumbleUpon there was no mention of facebook, and except one guy who made tones of money using flyers nothing in the money front either. Recently I was going to several videos of Ed Dale of the 30 day challenge and they recommend Facebook as a great marketing tool, and how forming groups is an essential part of training, although I wasn’t in the challenge, I now had another reason to try it out.

3. The only way to decide on the futility of usefulness of anything is to try it out. I can’t praise or criticizes anything unless I have experience to match it up. Therefore, I decided to start out on facebook and see how it goes.

One of the most important things I want to keep track of its how well facebook delivers value to the community.

I will in the continuing series of post lay down step-by-step, all the features of facebook from the sign of process. This will act as great guide to newbie’s to facebook and may enlighten even old followers. I will try out all the new applications and most importantly, I will continue to point out the best way to use facebook as a network of friends or/and as a marketing tool. I will not hesitate to criticize anything I see as non-user-friendly. Also, I will try out some test to reach the limits of social networking.

Enough of this rambling it is sounding more and more like a pledge. I started this post to introduce you to how I got into facebook and what my belief were prior to joining so you can all keep track of my progress and modification of beliefs. So be in tune for my series of posts on Facebook.