Let's Talk about Facebook

This month has been a little slow on the blog posts...  Mr. pointed it out to me last night that it is our worst month yet.  This is due to a few reasons:

1. I am still chugging through War and Peace so there have been less than normal book reviews.  I am ashamed at how long I have been reading this book but hope to get it done soon.

2.  I am not a night person so my "smart" time of the day is usually morning and afternoon.  This means I usually knock out some blog posts at work.  (Don't tell.)  Anyways, I have been ridiculously busy at work (staying until late, doing work at night and on the weekends..  I know I know HORROR!) so I don't have time to do random posts.

3.  Recently, Mr. and I cashed in a bunch of credit card points and got an iPad.  This has changed my (our) life.  It completes the triple crown of Apple products for us and now I can sit on the couch and be on the internet on a normal sized screen.  On top of this, I can watch what I want on TV and Mr. can watch his games on the iPad and we can both stay on the couch and thus marital harmony is being promoted.  Anyways, the iPad has sucked a lot of my time lately.

All this being said, Mr. and I bit the bullet recently and joined Facebook (or is it FaceBook? Eh, I don't really care).  I am not sure what would cause people more surprise the fact that we have joined FB or if we had announced we were having a baby?  These are two areas where we have been holding out while everyone else has succumbed.  Either way, we joined up and many hours have been spent trying to figure out settings, etc.

Friends
I spent some time being a friend request whore when we first joined.  Most have accepted but some have not.  I am choosing to think they just haven't received my request and not that I am being vetted or even declined.  Oh no!  Some people didn't get a request from me simply because I couldn't find them so don't take it personally if you didn't.  Either way, I have currently have 23 friends.  All but five I think are family so I think I might win the title of Popularity Queen.

Usability
As a someone whose job it is to develop software applications, I feel I have a bit of authority here.  Facebook is so NOT user-friendly.  I mean really?  There is no global setting to say "Hey, everything on here, I just want my friends to see it."  And why is the default for everything Public?  Nearly everyone I am friends with has limited their Privacy.  Another annoying non-global setting:  Setting it so that you can see all of your friend updates.  Why do I have to go into all friends individually?  And moreover, these settings don't seem to work anyways (case in point: I asked not to see Games updates from some people, but I still receive them.).  I have only a small number of friends so I went through all of them, but come on!  On top of this, I have somehow managed to set FB so that I get updates from only one friend emailed to me.  I have no idea how?  His settings are the same as everyone else.  Sigh....  I could go on but I'll won't.  In the end, FB is free so I can't complain too too much....

"You'll spend all your day on FB"
This is a common response to joining it.  However, maybe it is because I only have a few friends, FB seems like a place for people to post their kids pics and add political stuff and not much else.  I have been avoiding any political posts because I don't want to read stupid comments from close-minded people.  But, it takes like two seconds for me to peruse my news feed and call it a day.  I never got spending hours on the internet either so maybe it me who just doesn't get it.  On top of this, I have had to make a decision: Where to post: Twitter or FB?  Mr. and I have been talking and everyone on FB is like love-fest whereas Twitter is more sarcastic and mean like us.  So we think we like Twitter better.  Twitter is better for one-off thoughts.  FB is for pics and interesting life updates and yes, asking for donations for charity walks (My only FB post but I figured these are mostly family so it was fine.  I even asked Hoops if it was lame to do this and she said no.).

In the end, we are glad to be in the know finally and we like seeing all the pics of our nieces and nephew and other babies we know that we were missing before because people were just posting them on FB and not making a special effort to send them to us (if you can believe that!).  And we must confess we do like spying on people's pages as this has afforded us some gossip which we love.