ignorance

I am a strong advocate of facebook. I love learning about how facebook has been developed over the past couple years, their business plan, and I just love watching the changes that they have made to the site. It is just something that really interests me. I actually wrote a blog post when they released the new chat feature on facebook because I just thought it was brilliantly done. So just as a preface to this post, I am a very big supporter of facebook, and I believe that they have done some things with the online social networking world that is amazing. But I just want to write about some things that just annoy me to death when it comes to facebook, and it doesn't really have anything to do with facebook, persay, but more to do with how ignorant the people are that use it.

Here's the scenario...I log onto facebook tonight and just doing the usual checkup, checking messages, notifications, etc. Then I notice in my news feed that there is a "story" saying that this guy and girl, two of my friends had ended their relationship. I had already known about this, so I was just like, "ok, thats legit." And I go about my business, I go and write a blog post, then a couple minutes I go back to facebook and notice that two people had commented on this "news story." For those of you who do not know, facebook just added this new feature that allows you to comment on any news story directly from your news feed on your home page. I think it is a pretty nice feature. It allows you to comment on someone's status, and just makes the social networking better I think. So this is what two people had done, they had commented on this news story of these two people ending their relationship. These people commenting on the story were asking "did you really?" "what happened?" And in my in-the-moment fit of annoyance I commented back saying that it was ridiculous, like were they really expecting the people to comment back and tell you what happened? Actually as I'm writing this post more people are commenting on the story, saying that the person posted that they ended their relationship, so it was their own fault. But they did not post it at all. Unfortunately, one of the downsides of facebook I think is that their user preferences aren't the easiest to navigate through. So unless you spend about 15 minutes digging around in the preferences so that these things aren't automatically put in your news feed, unless you do that all that stuff is going to automatically be shown to the world in all of your friend's newsfeeds.

As I said, I am a strong supporter of facebook and I think it has done alot of good things. I think one of the most annoying things about facebook for me though is the whole "relationship" aspect of it. Like if you are dating someone then you can list yourself as in a relationship with this other person. Which, sure is great, until maybe you break up, then it sucks because the whole world knows about it, and we've come accustomed to this phrase, "its not official until its on facebook." So I would suggest that unless you really know the in's and out's of all the preferences and everything and you have total control of what you want publicized and what you don't want publicized, then I would just put minimal information on your profile. I actually just came out of a relationship and I had this on my profile, so of course I had to end it on facebook when we broke up, but thankfully I knew what I was doing with the preferences since I didn't want this all over everyone's newsfeed, so thankfully I didn't have to put up with any of this trash, but I know what its like to have to put up with it.

So I guess the question could be raised, "well if you don't like people commenting about the story in the newsfeed then, Josh, why are you blogging about it?" Why am I blogging about it? Hmmm, ok, well because I'm blogging about it so that people aren't ignorant and think that facebook is the end all be all of communication these days. I mean if you still wanted to talk to them about it on facebook, if you really cared then you could message them about it maybe, and by messaging them I mean sending them a private message that no one else can see. But then again, if you really like actually cared then I guess you would actually verbally talk to this person about it and find out what happened. This is why I'm blogging about it, because people are ignorant and I'm just trying to make it so there are less ignorant people in the world of facebook.

Then again, more and more adults are coming into the world of facebook. I just got a friend request from my aunt tonight, it is starting to be a family reunion on facebook. lol. Which I'm completely fine with, but that is another post for another time. I've done all my ranting for the night.

comments please...