Planet Geek

Facebook. Am I missing something?

Life. Don't talk to me about life.

So I have a profile on Facebook. It's been enjoyable fiddling around with the apps and linking up with other folks, and all that has been peachy keen. In particular, I rather like the Twitter-esque 'Status Updates' that folks can use to say "I'm home, and eating sushi" or whatever else strikes their fancy.

The problem is, I frequently see a Status update where someone says "I'm feeling down" and what I really want to do is go "Oh? What's up?"

But it appears the only way I can do that is to:

1. Click on the users name to go to their profile
2. Click on 'Send [user] a message'
3. Type a subject "So you're down?"
4. type a message
5. hit send

This doesn't seem like the interactive social structure I was looking for, where I could simply follow up on something I see with a "hey, what's up?". A message sent as above has no context, is not attached to the status update, etc etc.

In fact, Facebook seems structured in a way to NOT encourage that sort of spontaneous communication. It's more geared to "Lets funnel people toward shared functions or applications" as opposed to "Lets make it easier for people to communicate."

What am I missing? The initial funness of the site is starting to wear off a little bit. There's zillions of people on Facebook. What keeps them there?

Posted by dbs at November 27, 2007 9:52 PM