Free Candy For Everyone

Holy crap. If this is all true, I need to re-think some of my information sharing habits.

When writing my post of top time wasters I forgot one of them - Facebook. Facebook, you say? Yeah, the social networking site/application platform. With applications like iLike, I can lose way too much time. iLike is a music site, it integrates with the favorites artists you have listed on Facebook to tell you about upcoming concerts by your favorite bands. You can also use it to embed music in your profile. But my favorite way to waste time with it is the music quiz. It’s basically name-that-tune. They play a clip and you have to identify the artist or the song title. The quicker you respond, the more points you get. I like trying to answer as quickly as possible so my average response time is really low. It’s great fun and somehow I managed to just sit there listening, listening for quite some time.

Every time I go over to MySpace I cringe at the loud busy pages. But Facebook is so slimmed down. And it has great apps like Vampires vs. Werewolves that let’s you bite your friends, and Flixster that let’s you rate and review movies. It has a cool little Movie Compatibility Test that let’s you see how much like your friends your music tastes are.

And that’s enough about Facebook. I think I’ve written 3 posts about how fun it is. That’s enough. It’s not all that much fun, but it is a nice way to waste a few minutes here and there.

I’m starting to think that I publish way too much information about myself. Not only do I have this blog, I twitter. I’m on Friendster, MySpace, LinkedIn and Facebook. Since Facebook isn’t just a social network but also an application platform there are a gazillion apps you can install on your profile to share even more information. I added apps to share my music tastes and link to my Last.fm information. I’m trying an app that let’s you share information about what books you’re reading (which is redundant info since I’m already sharing all that information in my blog sidebar, you can see just about every book I’ve read in the last year+ at my library). Movies I like, an app to pull in my twitter info, pictures, etc etc.

Is this too much information? Is it a bit creepy that I’m putting all this out there for everyone to find out? I remember back in college when I made my very first web page. I was studying Computer Science, and my web page was linked to by the official department web page. I had very little there, but I did have a picture of myself and my email address. I got a totally weird email from some guy asking me out. He was a single father living in Chicago (right near where I went to school) and he’d seen my web page and thought I was great! Umm. Ok… I think I figured he’d be looking at the school web pages, looking for female CS students. But that made me totally uncomfortable and prompted me to take down all public links to pictures of myself.

Now here I am. If you google my name, you find this page. You can quickly find all my social network profiles and read way more about a complete stranger than you ever needed to know. And why? Why do we feel compelled to share everything?

I just don’t know, yet here I am, talking to you lot.

A friend of my invited me to friendster-myspace-social network I’ll forget about in 6 months.” I signed up and soon found myself impressed.

Facebook is the most technologically advanced of the social networks I’ve experienced. First, they have a mechanism to search your email contacts for anyone else using the service. You tell them which service and yes, you have to trust them with your account login info, but they swear they don’t save it! I trusted them, gave it a shot, and it soon listed about 10 people and asked if I wanted to make them my Facebook friends. Simple, no fuss, elegant.

I made the account because a friend wanted to share pictures with me. I soon got a notice that someone had tagged me in a picture. Huh, that’s nifty. The picture upload interface is awesome. It’s in java, and just embedded in the browser. Here’s a shot of it:

You can see little rotate arrows on the first image - you can rotate the picture right when you upload it. Neat. Then you can tag the picture with who’s in it. You click on locations on the picture and either select the Facebook friend who it is, or just type in a name. Here’s a picture of me and a friend’s cat, whose name happens to be Sir Alfred Oudler. When you mouse over the cat, his name pops up!

If you were to mouse over me, you’d see my name. These are great features I’d love to see on a desktop photo app! The ability to know who someone is in a photo just by mousing over them is just so smart. I love that.

I’m not much for using these social networking sites. I love to sign up, poke at them for a few days, then call it quits. But, actually, Facebook might be one worth using. It’s a great way to share photos. I’ll stick with it for a bit.