Facebook For Forty-somethings

I signed up for a facebook account about 3 months ago because Dexter did. The first time I met anybody with an account was in 2006 when I took a course in marketing and was on a group project with a bunch of twenty-somethings. The two young women from the U.S. argued that Facebook was the place to network, while the young man from India preferred Orkut, which is owned by Google. I've since read that Orkut is very popular in India and Brazil.

Top Reasons to Be On Facebook:
1 - What Facebook's marketing collateral, if it had any, would promote - "Reconnect with old friends and acquaintances." E.g., a girl, now woman-with-MBA, that I went to junior high with recently found me on Facebook, and told me about an upcoming high school reunion. You can search for people who went to the same high school/college that you did -or had the same job you had. Looks like there are only 4 of us from the class of 1983 with accounts. Maybe more will sign up as their kids get old enough - or if they are buddies with coworkers in their 20's.

2 - Advertise your blog/organization/cause/event, for free. You can create a "group" such as the "Baroque Opera is Way Happenin'" group. As noted in today's New York Times Sunday Magazine mini-memoir of life-as-a-blogger by Emily Gould, if you post your blog(s) on your facebook page, your traffic will skyrocket. I am thinking about advertising our rental apartment by creating a page (not the same thing as a group, I guess) for the apartment itself and then linking the page to groups formed by local grad students (we had a great experience renting to two MBA students at Babson College).

3 - Keep tabs on your husband in a way that is less dishonest than surreptitiously checking his text messages. Dexter frequently changes the status-update (the "microblog") and this status often reflects something at work - I learned exactly WHO was stealing someone's lactaid and using it as coffee creamer. (At first when Dexter filled me in on the story I confused lactaid with Mylanta and was really grossed out).



4 - Scrabulous. An unofficial scrabble game that you play with Facebook friends. It's not nearly as much as a time-suck as other online games - you simply play your next word, and toggle back to real work (or more online timewasting). No need for the pesky math required in the real world to calculate the values of letters on pink v. blue squares - Scrabulous does all the work for you.


Top Reasons to Avoid Facebook

1 - The flip side of number 3, above. Dexter will be glad to know that I haven't dated in fourteen years. In 1994 technology for courtship included: 1) letters; 2) telephone; 3) notes in your work mailbox. I can't imagine dating now and being stuck with the decision of whether or not to "friend" someone I was about to go out on a date with. What happens if it doesn't work out, either immediately, or after a couple of months? When do you de-friend? Do you de-friend your ex's friends? And, most troubling, when do you change your "relationship status" from "single" to "in a relationship." If I don't send the girls to a Irish convent and/or an extremely conservative Amish community for their teen years, I will require they leave this field blank in the Facebook-type accounts they will inevitably have.

2- If you're a teacher, you need to think carefully about what you make public.