The Good and Bad of Facebook

Facebook is used by a ton of people, maybe more than stalker space (aka myspace). There are some good things and some bad things about facebook. First, the bad things about Facebook and the obsessive Facebook users:

- If someone comments on your wall, they expect you to comment back, otherwise you don't like them. (which is probably true in most cases)
- Writing words to express feelings can be misinterpreted because some people lack the ability to define tone in a written statement. When this happens, others react completely different than what you would think.
- People whom you have never met before take offense if you do not want to be their friends. Seriously? Get a life if that's how you react to it.
- People you knew of but never liked/got along with take offense when you don't add them as your friends. Seriously? Again, get a life.
- People think they are cool because they have more friends than you on Facebook...even though they don't know half the people on their list.
- People will send you a message on Facebook and expect you to look at it right away. It's called a phone, use it if you need to get a hold of someone right away!
- There are thousands of applications to download for nothing useful. For example, cavemen, vampires (I actually kind of like the vampire app), best friend applications (what is this world coming too with a best friends application?), etc. And...these applications require that they can look up your information whenever needed. No thanks.
- People post their opinions/comments on a profile application where the point is to have others comment with you, and get offended if you don't have the same opinion. If you don't want people to comment, keep it to yourself!
- People want you to join thousands of groups that continuously send you spam messages everyday.

Now the good things about Facebook:

- You can keep in touch with friend that you don't associate with often.
- You can update multiple people on how you/your family is doing by posting up pictures and videos without repeating yourself to everyone each time they ask how you are doing.
- You can make people that you don't want to be friends with upset (at least it makes me laugh).
- You can store pictures and videos online without having to keep them on your hard drive.
- You can chat online whilst avoiding talking on the phone for hours with someone.
- You can delete people whenever you feel like it.

So as you can see, the negative actually outweighs the positive, but the positive can be fun at times. I don't mind Facebook too much. In fact, I like to keep up with people that I was close with at one time or another. I don't necessarily look at other peoples' profiles, but more on their current comments and status messages.

My huge beef with Facebook is how serious some people take it. I get friend requests from people I have never met, heard of, or even thought existed pretty often. Why do you think I'm going to add you to my friends list so you can see my personal information? I don't get it. Sometimes I get a request from someone I knew back in the day and it takes me a while to realize who they are. If I knew we were friends at one time I'd say yes to their request. However, most of the time it's people I never associated with the entire time I was around them (i.e. school, work, etc.). Why do people think it's cool to stay home all day and get as many friends online as they can? Who are they thinking they are actually impressing? I just don't get it.

For a while there I was saying "Decline" to friend requests from a great deal of people that I did not really care about staying in contact with. Usually if family adds me I will always add them no matter how close we are, because it's family and you never know when you are going to get together. My wife told me I should just start adding people because it's nice to see what people are up to. I took her advice, added a bunch of people that asked me to be friends, then a week later deleted all of them. There was no point in adding them as they were just trying to build up their "friends" list. You are the people I don't want to associate with because I truly see you showing up to my house with a knife wondering where your dog ran off too.

Facebook users need to calm down and enjoy what they have instead of making it their entire life. Seriously, get a life and do something.