Inventing for the Rest of Us

I received a VERY surprising phone call from my mom the other day. While I was expecting the usual fare like “where is Laura’s internship for the summer,” or “have you called your niece/sister/brother lately,” she busted out with the question “SHOULD I JOIN FACEBOOK?”

I must say I was taken aback. She never asked if she should get on MySpace. She gets my Dad to upload her photos to her computer. i.e. She doesn’t tweet.

I must admit though, in the 2-3 months leading up to this question I noticed some of my over-40 relatives all of a sudden joining Facebook. It was like a virus. It started with some distant relatives in New York. Then my sister in Louisiana. Then my cousin in Dallas and one in Austin. THEN my Mom!

Facebook must be doing something right if she is asking that question. Twitter didn’t prompt her to ask that question. Neither did craigslist, myspace, friendster, or any of their predecessors, spin-offs, and look-a-likes.

Okay, to get to the point of this post, what did I tell my mom when she asked if she should join Facebook?

I have issues with facebook. Although I’m in the target facebook crowd – actually maybe a two or three years older than the original facebookers (now 24-25) – I don’t like to use it that much. I admit, it’s been a great way to find old friends from when I lived in Dubai. Or check out what the ex is up to. But is that stuff that really better’s my life?

Does it better your life to know what some random dude from your middle school is up to? What about high school acquaintances? Actually, when I first joined facebook, I spent WAAAAY too much time on it (as I’m sure others have had issues with as well). There were two things that convinced me that I needed to minimize my interaction with Facebook.

1) Facebook is just another website in a long line of similar sites. In 3-5 years, there will probably be another, much better site. Internet sites come and go. Remember AOL? Remember Prodigy? Shoot, remember Yahoo? Soon, we’ll be saying remember Facebook? And when that time comes, we’re all going to have to start our profiles, networks, etc. from scratch. So I decided I didn’t want to put too much time into one social network site because they fizzle and pop. Although facebook is bigger than I thought it would be, which I’m happy for because maybe it’ll stick around and all my time spent won’t go to waste, it still burns through cash like me through Girl Scout thin mints.

2) I realized that my building my online social network, I had less time for my actual real-life social network. Some people spend so much time on the site, they don’t actually interact in person with any of the friends.

This is what I told my Mom. I told her that she probably didn’t need to join. I told her that she would wind up spending so much time catching up with people that aren’t really in her life anymore, that she would have less time for the people THAT REALLY MATTER AND ARE IN HER LIFE NOW.

Of course not everyone may agree with me. And I still have some marketing tricks I want to try on Facebook, so I’m glad it’s there. But I just don’t want to spend time on my social network at the expense of my friends.

- Daigle