There are lots of inexpensive tools on the Interwebs that are really useful. I like finding them.

I’m sure you know the kind of people this post is directed to – the annoying, snobby, elitist people who refuse to join Facebook. And if you are in this group, most of your friends think you are annoying, snobby, and elitist. All you anti-Facebookers need to get off your high horses and discover why Facebook is a great tool.

The dumb stuff I hear from these web 2.0 poo-pooing people includes:

1. I don’t have the time or patience for setting up ANOTHER online profile;
2. I’m afraid I won’t have many friends to connect with;
3. Facebook is a stupid waste of time;
4. Anything of importance that I can do on Facebook I can do though email or the phone;
5. Facebook is just a fad, like Friendster (and MySpace. Snap.);
6. I don’t wanna bother putting up little status updates, nor would I care about all the mundane crap that my various Facebook “friends” do all day.

But I know where these folks are coming from. The only reason why I joined Facebook in the first place is that my last job made me…which of course is ironic, considering how much time I subsquentely wasted on it during work hours. The only real prior experience I had with social networking sites ended with a really ugly MySpace page containing a bunch of media plug-ins that never worked. Like this one. Or this one. Or this one. Or this one. (I think that last one is purposefully annoying, but still, creating a page that awful should not be possible.)

Once I started, Facebook was easy to like. Setting up a new account is made as easy as possible, the user interface is extremely intuitive and attractive, and…it has games on it! With which I quickly got bored. Oh, and my fear that I wouldn’t have any Facebook friends was thankfully proved false. Facebook has some amazing tools that helped me find people I knew that were dying to welcome me to their fun cult.

I think the real reason for Facebook’s popularity is that it facilitates more productive relationships with others in your social circles. First, as more and more information becomes digitized and searchable, Facebook is a terrific way to efficiently share information you find interesting with others that have your same interests. If you like to surf, it’s easy to post a link on your Facebook page about the bitchin’ surf board shop you found in Jeffrey’s Bay, South Africa; this link will then pop up on all your friends pages, and more than likely some of them will find it useful. And in turn you benefit from your friend’s postings as more and more of them join and connect with you.

But the most important thing I discovered about the site came from reading my friend’s “mundane” status updates. This is actually an extremely effective way to keep in touch with a large number of people on a personal, and even professional, level. I have nurtured many languishing friendships by simply posting a comment or two on a friend’s status update about their new cat or bad customer service experience. The argument that social networking sites are making us value “real” friendships less is absurd. And usually voiced by grumpy old fossils.

So drink deep. Everybody else is doing it.

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