Facebook has come a long way from its beginnings in 2003.  The Facebook babble being generated over dorm room broadband Internet connections back then was certainly not for parent’s eyes.  In fact, Facebook effectively barred most parental participation; you couldn’t join if you didn’t have a college email address.  Its not that it was necessarily filled with obscene or shocking content; it’s just that it was more strictly a social connection tool within a private club primarily for college undergrads.  But as Facebook grows up, it is realizing a larger potential.  Its doors are now open for anyone to join, and it has become an extremely useful and versitile tool (about which I discuss in a previous post.)

Facebook is like the high school pothead that floors everyone at his 10-year reunion by arriving with a Porche, a fantastic career, and a hot wife.  Despite its success, it nonetheless struggles to shake the slacker image that lingers in the eyes of those it grew up with.  Therefore the thought of parents being included in Facebook friends lists is often repellent to most users, particularly to the twenty-something crowd that met Facebook when it still knew how to party.

My own parents were born in the mid-40′s and are currently not Facebook people.  They are computer-friendly people however, as my dad uses his computer and iPhone everyday, and my mom is a very regular email/Internet user.  I increasingly rely on Facebook as an extremely effective and useful way to exchange a broad range of information with people I care about.  If this is the case, why don’t I include my parents in the loop?  I have a few compelling reasons for me to encourage them to create an account:

• With my parents paying attention to my status updates throughout the week, it would give us more to talk about during our weekly check-in calls.  (This works the other way as well.  If your goal is to have less to talk about with your parents when you get around to calling them, giving them a view into your Facebook life could reduce their pries into your actual life.)
• Having access to my Facebook profile would give them a surprisingly large amount of information about what I do all day.  Details like these are hardly ever remembered and brought up on a phone call, but they would probably be very much appreciated by my parents.
• Facebook is making it increasingly easy to adjust exactly who can see exactly what in my profile.  So if I don’t want my parents to see my posted photos, I don’t have to let them.
• Even though they don’t know it, they have Facebook friends to connect with.  First, their friends are friending me with increased frequency.  Second, I’m sure Facebook’s amazing friend-finding tools would show both my mom and dad that a lot more of their friends are drinking the Facebook Kool-Aid than they think.
• Facebook could be a really great tool for them to use – they just need to take the short amount of time needed to sign up and discover that for themselves.

Now, inviting the parents to keep up with your Facebook self might require some permanent Facebook behavior changes.  I suppose it depends on your family’s dynamics, but you probably aren’t ready for Facebook parental supervision if:

• Your profile is filled with pictures of you drunk at parties;
• You regularly include expletives in your status updates;
• Your “friends” on Facebook are mostly just people with hot profile pics that accepted your friend request because they are friend collectors;
• You often share NSFW links;
• You regularly join overtly sexual Facebook fan pages.  I’m no prude, but personally I hate Facebook friends who overflow my newsfeed with messages telling me that they are fans of hot chicks or 2(x)ist Underwear.  I mean who doesn’t love both of those, but I bet most of these people have been blocked from their friends’ newsfeeds, and I’m sure their parents would do the same.

So go ahead – send your parents an invitation to Facebook (and a link to this blog post if they need further rationalization).  Facebook has grown up – why don’t you?

Related posts:

1. I love Facebook and Kool-Aid
2. Streamy.com: A clown car for social networking feeds

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.

Related posts:

1. Parents make good Facebook friends!
2. Streamy.com: A clown car for social networking feeds

Most of my (unproductive) Internet time is spent on Twitter, Facebook, and looking at my various RSS feeds.  Typically, I browse my various Twitter accounts using Tweetie (Mac only), my Facebook Newsfeed using the Adobe AIR Facebook Application, and my RSS feeds using NetNewsWire (Mac only).  These browser-free options are all great, but I am always looking for more efficient ways to view all three of these things at the same.

Yesterday, Mashable.com had a post about Streamy.com.  This is a site that aggregates your Twitter, Facebook, (as well as various other social networking sites) and RSS feeds all into one website.  It even accesses my Google Talk account to let me IM folks.  It has been around for a while, and when I tried it out in the past I found it was really buggy – it never did let me add my Facebook account to my profile.  But after playing around with it again last night for about 30 minutes I was able to load all my various accounts into it, and it works pretty darn well.

It can be slow in refreshing some information and I had to reload the page a few times to get me out of loading limbo, but it has come a long way.

Definitely worth checking out.

Related posts:

1. I love Facebook and Kool-Aid
2. Parents make good Facebook friends!