Facebook

If you have no idea what Facebook is, well it is a social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. Users can add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves.

Additionally, users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region. The website's name stems from the colloquial name of books given at the start of the academic year by university administrations with the intention of helping students get to know each other better.

A January 2009 Compete.com study has ranked Facebook as the most used social network by worldwide monthly active users, followed by MySpace.

I really had initially ZERO interest in Facebook or MySpace because is does seem to be a waste of time and not particularly "fun" or "interesting" but I joined because my niece Dena had sent out invites to everyone and I thought it might be a good way to stay in touch with family members.

So I signed up and suddenly I was bombarded with invites from people that I hadn't heard of in years!
 (As a newbie I was ignorant about all the different privacy settings available to me at that time, but I quickly learned!!)

The first few weeks I went back and forth between "This is cool!" to "This is so annoying and intrusive!" Of course, it usually depended upon 'who' had discovered me on Facebook and sent me a friend request...

But now, I think Facebook is interesting, fun, a sounding board, time-waster and a also ultimately a good way to stay in touch with family and friends.

I have learned how to adjust my settings so people can't see my Facebook page and profile unless I want them to and once you learn to manage Facebook and to tweak it to your own preferences; then it can be as inclusive or as exclusive as you want it to be - and it is no longer intrusive as it was before I learned to control it.

I do take a few quizzes, toss a few pillows and post a couple of pics now and then but it isn't something that I spend a lot of time on - some of the Facebook pages are amazing exercises in über-narcissism but then, so is a blog...

So now the question is:

My First Blog, My First Post

I have never really had the urge to 'blog' and while in my youth, I used to journal a lot; it was a different medium than blogging. Journals were, in my opinion, private writings, musings, rantings and meant to be discovered after one was dead so people could be titillated and amused - perhaps even surprised at 'who' the auteur de défunt really was as a person and what they 'really' thought.

I always liked that bit about journals and the possibility of having my own journal discovered after my preferably tragic and untimely death. However, my journals mostly contained insufferably boring platitudes that even I, myself didn't care about after I had written it.

That said, this blogging experiment could be a complete waste of time and be even worse than having my posthumous journal found because a few years ago studies showed that typical visitors decided within 8 seconds if they'd stay or leave a site.

Most recently, however, that time frame has been cut in half to 4 seconds. Either way, that's not much time so it is entirely possible that those who stumble upon my blog won't make it past the first few sentences.

For those of you who have made it to this line in my first blog entry, I thank you and I hope that future posts will be scintillating, thought provoking and provocative!!

Most likely not.

Maybe I should just do a foodie/recipe blog or find creative ways to sprinkle the words 'sex' and 'porn' and the number one searched word on Google ('powerball') throughout my blog so that the search engines pick my blah, blah, blahs out of the blogging tarpit?

Mata ne!!