Funny conversation from last night

Erin and I went to Sepia (123 N Jefferson St) last night for dinner to celebrate her birthday with her brother Eli, and his girlfriend Lizzy. I remembered earlier in the day that Erin had added our dogs Dylan and Roscoe to Facebook via an application called Dogbook. I started laughing about that, and told Eli and Lizzy that they should join Facebook. They both kind of laughed and asked us why they should join Facebook. Funny thing is - Erin and I didn't have a solid answer for them. Our best answer was: "so we'll be connected". Wow, that's a pretty soft sell to two people that we should be connected to on a social network. The more we talked about Facebook, the more we came to a conclusion that Facebook albeit interesting at times, is pretty much a waste of time.

Here's a daily sample of our interaction with Facebook:

• Receive a request to join Pirates vs Ninjas (huh?)
• Receive a request to join Vampires vs Wherewolves (again, wtf?)
• Receive an animated plant grow over time (i do like flowers though)
• Watch an animated egg hatch over time (wait, let me finish watching baby einstein first before i watch this miracle of life)
• Receive an inbox message (you get notified via email when you get these messages, except the email doesn't actually tell you what the message is)
• Play a game of hot potato (similar to those old emails where you're asked to forward the email to everyone you know, but less spammy)
• Join a group (with a name that is funny enough to be on a t-shirt, but group activity that is interesting enough to capture your attention for about 30 seconds)

Don't get me wrong - the people behind and involved in the Facebook ecosystem are brilliant people - and there are some interesting things being done that can only be done with a community as large as Facebook - like contextual advertising and forcing developers to massively scale their applications. And there are a lot of good, simple things about Facebook too - it's interface, the birthday updates, the ability to post articles to friends, etc. It's just that in the whole scheme of things, Facebook falls somewhere between getting my oil changed every 3000 miles and cleaning out the garage.

Jeff is currently planning on wasting less time :)