I finally have a Facebook account. Mostly because I’ve been wondering what all the fuss was about, but also because I keep getting invitations from friends to join. The peer pressure has finally worn me down!

http://www.facebook.com/people/John_Cuthbertson/725432824

It seems I also now have a bunch of “friends”. There’s a few I’ve approached myself (even though I’ve not spoken with them in years (some since high school) and there are some that wanted to be friends with me.

If you’d like to be my friend, just ask!

Now, I’m trying to understand how Facebook can be a benefit to me, rather than waste what little spare time I have. I’m the sort of person who would normally phone or go and see a friend, rather than play text message or email tag.

Scrabulous…and other games

I’ve started a few Scrabulous games with some friends. The dictionary and “allowed words” leave me scratching my head though. I thought Proper Nouns and abbreviations were illegal in Scrabulous. Its an intersting experience waiting on a friend in Kampala (the capital of Uganda) to have their turn. Her internet connection was too slow for her to play and we had to wait until she returned to the UK.

My Friend Network

I’ve had Laura in the office doing some writing for my backpacker walking tours website. Laura is a mid-twenties, English backpacker who’s visiting Sydney on her way to Thailand. She’s a writer “by trade” but is loving the backpacker lifestyle.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Laura_Jones/510768878

Laura has some 300+ Facebook friends, so she’s obviously a more popular person than me. I asked her why she likes Facebook. She said she uses it to keep in touch with her disjointed, dislocated group of backpacking buddies, and it helps her update family back home as to where she is and what she’s doing.

I tried to work out the “social networking” benefit that a business might gain from running a Facebook group. Anyone can create a Group. You just need to have enough friends to invite to the Group in order for the Group to “take off”. I’d joined numerous Groups (but then left many of them within days). It seems that most Groups do nothing. You get Facebook spam (notifications of irrelevant stuff posted by other Group members you don’t know, that has no interest to you), but most of the Groups had a funny name, but that was about it.

My Faceboook Groups

I’ve started a Facebook group of my own:

Tasmanian Entrepreneurs

So far we have 8 Members who are friends I know from Tasmania. I’m from Tasmania myself, and have been in Sydney for a little over two years.

I’m meeting with a fellow expat Tasmanian who’s running a PR company in Sydney to see whether we might be able to get the Group up and running. I think this kind of defeats the purpose of Facebook in that I’m actually going to have to meet with a living, breathing person!