Building a Social Network/Collaboration

The only social networking site that I use is Facebook, with the exception of the twitter account that I created for this class. I did not have a Facebook until well after the majority of my friends, but I created it after I attended a summer program in between tenth and eleventh grade, and when I came home I decided it was the best way to keep in touch with all of the people I met there. Since that summer, my time on Facebook has increased rapidly. Considering I was so ambivalent about creating one if the first place, it is some what ironic that I am on Facebook the majority of the time that I am on my computer, and there really is no reason for me to be on it quite so often. Yes, I do use it to keep in touch with friends, arrange meetings with people for group projects, and the messages have taken the place of my email for telling people notable things that are happening in my life, but for the amount that I am not Facebook, I do not do these things very often. Sometimes I use it to play tetris, instant message (even though this feature has lots of problems and works much better through aim), but really a lot of my time on it is spent doing nothing. I'll refresh my home page every so often and see pictures of people from middle school who I really don't care about any more and things like that, and I certainly use it for procrastinating (this is when I look at those pictures of people I don't care about), but I really could not explain why exactly I use Facebook quite so often.

I would say that I find the most useful thing about Facebook is that it helps with keeping in touch, and the most useless thing are the "suggestions" that are constantly showing up in the corner. Facebook does not seem to understand that the reason I havent written on my second grade friend from ballet's wall in a while, is because I don't have anything to say to her.

My electronic interactions with my classmates would include Twitter, and blogs, because I was unable to find anyone through Second Life (interesting side note - the blog says that "Twitter" is spelled correctly, but thinks that "Facebook" is a typo). I guess blogs can be useful if people think that what they have to say can be useful to other people, but I still do not see any reason to use Twitter as apposed to the status updates on Facebook.

My social networking is useful in some ways, but without it I would probably get more homework done. On the other hand, I would talk to some people less, and my cell phone bill would probably be higher.