Against my better judgment I have created a Facebook account. Sometimes I do these things just to see how they work. As I moved about the office I would see people interrupting their normal procrastinating web surfing with long visits to Facebook.
For anyone still reading this who doesn’t know what Facebook is I’ll provide a quick intro. It is an online social networking service that allows you to post up a picture of yourself and a simple profile. You then look for other people’s profiles that you know and then invite them to be friends. Simple… to begin with, but then the links form into networks. Within these networks information is shared and that is where it starts to get interesting…..
So now just watching my own Facebook profile I get a stream of the interesting, the creative, the playful, and (more often than not) the completely inane. It is strangely addictive, but already I have been linked to a couple of people that I have barely spoken to since leaving high school. And it felt good.
That seems to be part of the draw of these types of sites. It is not the silly little messages that appear all day, but the small smile that creeps onto my face when I read them and the tiny inspiration that I get when I see beauty in another’s photos. It is the micro emotional connections that they offer that somehow bring people together that I like.
The inspiration is to do it more in the offline world as well.