I'm On Facebook, Help Me!

In the last few weeks, I have recently been persuaded by my friend N@ to join Facebook. Along the lines of MySpace, it appears to be much more popular amongst my UK friends, in that they are much more likely to respond to my messages. Unfortunately, joining yet another "hey pay attention to me and be my friend" site is taxing my admittedly already crappy cyborz skillz. It's all I can do right now to keep up with this blog. I am belatedly realizing that you can spend WAY too much time maintaining all things internet.

The upshot is, I've spent at least 3 hours trying to figure out what in the hell you're supposed to do on it, with limited success. I managed to get a picture of myself on there and get a few friends to add me to theirs. Yay me! I am not a total loser! I will rest easier now basking in that knowledge.

Which leads me to another question about this whole FaceSpace/MyBook phenomenon. I'm quite sure this idea has been posited before elsewhere, but aren't these sites really not just jumped-up popularity contests? I mean, does anyone really have 10,420 friends? I think not, sir, I think not. Oh alright, I know that bands, comedians, even films and businesses all have their own MySpace pages now, and it's a grand way to promote your work, I suppose. But still, if you're not a band, comedian, or a film, try easing up on the adds a little. It smacks of desperation.

Everybody who is listed as a friend of mine on either of my sites (except for Tom on MySpace - he just won't go away, he stalks me every day) is more than an actor from a movie I liked, or a band I enjoy listening to. I have actually spoken to them, ate with them, cried on their shoulder, hung out with them, heckled them personally in some way shape or form, or generally gotten to know them as a person in some fashion. Does this mean I lose at the internets?

Perhaps it's just a generational difference, and I am nothing if not old and cranky now. One of our friend's teenage daughters added me to her MySpace, in a moment of pity for an ageing lady I think, and it's amazing the stuff they can do and they stuff they say. Wow. Reading her page, I do get a glimmer of the way things could have been for me regarding my relationship with computers, had I been born 15 years later than I was. Instead of the enemy, the computer could have been my friend. Awwwww.......

P.S. My brain zaps are still going strong, maybe that's why all this stuff seems so complicated at the moment; yeah, that's it, it's not me that's stoopid, it's all my brain's fault! Um, wait, that means my brain is ..... well, never mind then, maybe it's not such a good theory. Stoopid brain!