Public Service Announcement 002: Facebook Status Updates.

I joined Facebook only about a year ago. After a couple months of my classmates in the x-ray program asking if I'd joined yet, I finally signed up and made my first noobish post to much fanfare and amusement. I mean, why not? -- pretty much everyone is on it now anyway. Yes, including my mom and several aunts and uncles.

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This isn't quite the reaction I had when I got more than a few friend requests from the older members of my family, but I'd previously heard about people complaining that their parents were stalking them on FB, scrolling through their photo albums looking for incriminating evidence and/or posting stuff on their friends' Walls:

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Thankfully my family's not that active on Facebook in general, so even if I were doing things my mom wouldn't necessarily approve of, chances are they'd miss my status updates. Not that I'd be posting about them anyway, but some people, unbelievably, still don't seem to realize just how public your information can be. They'll put stuff up about their latest experiments with mind-altering substances and/or stories about some crazy sexual conquest.

Granted, those are a much better (and far more hilarious) read than your typical "Having lunch with my BFF!!" or "GOD my life SUCKS" or "I just planted 35 acres of bananas in FarmVille" or "♫ [insert Top 40 song lyrics here] ♫" status updates -- or even worse, constant inane chatter:

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Yeah, I've had to hide some of you guys for this last one especially. Sorry. (But not really.) Sometimes, it's just better to STFU.

Okay, rant over. Have a great Monday :D

Of course, shameless plug: Friend me on Facebook! But please don't flood my Feed with crap like I just wrote about, or you'll get smashed with the Hide Hammer.

Buzzed Off.

So yesterday I posted on Buzz how I wasn't going to use it for its social networking convergence abilities anymore:

Hm. After a couple of weeks I'm not really seeing the utility of Buzz (yet, anyway). I'm temporarily disconnecting my accounts from being pulled into Buzz -- although everyone is more than welcome to visit and comment directly on my blog, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and other accounts as they are updated on a regular basis. (You can visit http://flavors.me/rangamboa or my Google Profile to see the links.)

I realize that the point of Buzz is to consolidate many of my updates across the Web into a single space. However, there's a significant amount of overlap among them already, so Buzz almost seems redundant. Unsurprisingly, there's been a lot of talk on the 'Net about how Google is too late to the social networking party. I wouldn't count Google out completely, but the points are valid. My own reasons are that:

1. Only a fraction of my friends/contacts use Gmail.
2. Many of my Gmail-using friends have opted not to use Buzz.
3. Buzz's design remains rather clunky and inelegant (come on Google, you can do better).
4. There isn't enough current activity in there to warrant maintenance of another social networking app.

I'll still check into Buzz whenever I get a notification inside my Gmail account (and will even post an occasional reply or two) but honestly, I think I'll do just fine without it.