My name is Doug and I am a recovering Facebook addict!
I guess I need a support group of some sort…
Recently, I was taking some time out to relax and for some reason, I started thinking about how much time I am spending on Facebook. I don’t update my status too often but I am connected to Facebook almost 24×7. I have Facebook access, not only on my computer but also on my cell phone. I can poke people, play games and read my friends post from pretty much anywhere and at almost any time.
The thing I cannot understand is why do I do it. I get up in the morning and check my wall along with half a dozen time wasting games that I play throughout the day and night. Before I go to bed, I make sure that I do things in the time based games on how long I plan on sleeping. I make sure that I am ahead in points or levels in the games against my wife and friends but I am not sure why I do it. I don’t get any income or real satisfaction from doing it but I cannot stop doing it either.
From Mafia Wars to Fish Life to FarmVille and MyZoo, I can’t stop clicking on those applications. Why? I don’t know but I do know that if I applied all the time that I spend on those games to my blogs, I would have 20 or more posts per day!
For now, I am going to try to limit my Facebook time to only a few minutes an hour and hopefully I can get to the point where I only check it a few times each day. I had an easier time stopping smoking than I am kicking this addiction.
Are you finding yourself doing that same thing? Do you spend too much time on Facebook? Leave a comment and let me know. Maybe we can start our own on-line support group for Facebook addicted users and spend our time on there too.
I was one of the first people to get a T-mobile G1 running the, open source, Google Android operating system. Because it was open source, I expected there to be more and better applications available for the Android Platform than even the iPhone but sadly, even after a year since it was announced the applications and the Android Market place haven’t been stellar by any means. They didn’t even offer a usable Facebook application and rumor had it , because of the issues between Google and Facebook, there might never be a ” official Android” Facebook application.
Fast forward to September 8, 2009 and suddenly there was an official Facebook application for the Android Platform. Not only was it more than just a wrapper of the mobile Facebook website, it was an actual application written for the Android platform and it is free.
Since I am a somewhat heavy Facebook user I couldn’t find any satisfaction in the other Facebook applications. There is even a paid Facebook application that started out with good intentions but soon and quickly went downhill.
As you can guess, I was really excited to try the new application and ended up installing it almost as soon as it showed up in the Android Market Place. Within seconds after install I was logged in and reading my feed. Most of the other apps that I used often took 30 seconds or longer to load my feed, even on the the 3G data network but this application loaded my feed in just a couple of seconds. I thought that my eyes were playing tricks on me but it has been consistently fast over the last five days that I have been using it.
Some of the main features are;
- Reading your feed.
- Reading and posting to your wall.
- “Like” from the main feed.
- View user (friends) information.
- Take, upload and attach a comment to photos.
- Upload photos stored on your phone.
- You can also post from the main feed page.
- It is free.
There are also other settings for notifications and the way the application behaves;
- You can refresh the feed by shaking the phone.
- Message notification.
- Poke notification.
- Friend request notification.
- Event invite notification.
- Other features like vibrate, phone LED and ring-tones for notifications.
There are a couple of things that aren’t integrated into the application. When you get messages, poke or other notifications and select them, it opens the internet browser and takes you to the mobile Facebook website (m.facebook.com), which seems kind of clunky but it is functional. I am hoping, as the application matures, it will have many of those features integrated into the application itself but only time will tell.
Now that I can use Facebook on my Android phone, my thoughts of trading my G1 in for an iPhone have been put behind me. The Android platform has a long way to go before it can stand up next to Apple and their iPhone mountain but I feel that this effort will bring Google a few feet closer to the top.
There is a lot to be said about social media sites like plurk.com and twitter.com. If you are a blogger and follow some of those sites for ideas about how to improve your blogs, promote them or what the trends of blogging are in general, you can get a lot of good information.
You can also get ideas about concepts that you might never have thought about. One such concept is having people use a term or word that catches on. What I mean is, for many years, when people said they needed to make a copy of something, they would say “let me take a Xerox of that piece of paper” or “go to the Xerox machine and make me 10 copies.” If you were using a Ricoh or Kodak copier, people still used the term Xerox. Another good example is Google. How many times have you heard someone say “I will Google that.” Even though you might use Yahoo or MSN to do the search almost everyone I know says Google when they want to search for something on the web. These types of synonyms have an impact on our minds and sometimes, I am not sure that we know were are using them because they are used almost automatically at times.
Why couldn’t we use these associations with other things? What other things you ask? A friend of mine, who I met through Plurk.com named Rob is using that same idea. Rob has a website related to all things about blogging called, you guess it, bloggeries.com. His idea is to have us use the term bloogeries as a synonym for blog post. Every time was make a reference to a blog post, he suggests we use the term bloggeries. The neat part about this is that people are doing it. I have even found myself doing it when talking about posts. The way that Rob has marketed this idea has kept it in my mind when I am writing bloggeries like this one.
This just shows how a simple idea and the use of social media to share it can turn something simple into the next big thing. Hopefully many of you can come up with something similar and create your own synonym for your passion too.
After reading an article about the small world theory from the Washington Post a few days ago, I have been thinking about how many people I have met through social media sites like Plurk and Twitter. In the two short months that I have been using Plurk, I have almost 30 new friends. Some friends are as close as a 30 minute drive and there are others who live a couple continents away. These are people that I do not think I would have met if it was not for social media and the internet.
Do any of you feel that your world has gotten smaller?
Social Media | Doug October 19, 2009 | 
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