Facebook

I've gone active on Facebook, and I'm very impressed.

My first social network was Friendster, signing up on November 2003. It was real cool because I got my future wife's phone number within two weeks of joining. How about that? I also joined MySpace, but I never got into it because the UI was and is far too ghastly. Also, I wasn't into the US independent music scene where MySpace really excels at.


I started using Friendster less and less when I got quite disappointed with their blogging utility. After I migrated That's the Game! on Blogspot it was pretty much downhill for me and Friendster. That said, most Filipinos favored it, perhaps ignorant or too lazy to explore other networks. This meant any instance where I met a new set of contacts, they would invariably become my contacts on Friendster.

Over the past year I've been active on Multiply, because of the ease of use and the quality of the contacts I have there. By quality I mean these contacts actually post good stuff on their blogs and I don't mind participating in the conversations at all. A lot of them maintain their blogs on Friendster as well, but like I said, blogging there is teh suxx0rz.

On to Facebook. The blog function on Facebook is simply posting on the Notes function. It's not special in any way. It's similar to Multiply that it can import posts from Blogspot, so I'm happy with that at least. The cool thing about Facebook is that there's so many applications that can be added, modified, and removed with total ease. These range from way to interact, like poking and sending virtual gifts to friends, to displaying identity information like places I've traveled, sports-related and pop-culture related applications like Harry Potter magic spells, up to nonsense weird fun like turning your friends to zombies and raising an undead army to fight werewolves and vampires who are all my contacts.
Right now I've just resisted the urge to join the war between ninjas vs. pirates, but I have succumbed to the Dark Side and became a Sith reclaiming dominance of the Force against the Jedis. I have a virtual aquarium populated by fish sent by friends. All this done in the space of a week.

Sure there's lots of spamming due to the number of applications people add and they invite their friends to, but that's not so bad because it's so much fun.

I'll keep my Friendster account and my Multiply account, but to all my contacts: Facebook is where it's at.