To be fair, I'm not sure you're the target demographic. I got on Facebook freshman year of college ('04), and it's really useful when you have a lot of friends who are scattered throughout the country, just to keep in vague touch. I get reminders when folks' birthdays are, which is surprisingly useful, and it makes it really easy to play the "I haven't talked to X in ages! I wonder how she's doing?" game. And in general, it is surprisingly addictive to just browse through and see how your friends are doing.

Plus, the online scrabble game is highly addictive.

I think that the critical mass of college students who are all hooked up to Facebook is Microsoft's angle.

Come on Kevin, where's my USC post? I'd like the chance to gloat a bit.

Well, well- first Kevin's googling butts on the internet, now he's poking people, who knows what's next . . . tsk, tsk : )

Does Larry Craig poke or peek?

I find LiveJournal useful because a bunch of people I already knew signed up on LJ at about the same time, so I started off with a built-in community there. If I hadn't, I'm not sure what the point would have been.

MySpace and FaceBook, I gather, take the same idea that LJ had, and push it way forward. But it still seems to start off with you and a bunch of your friends using MS or FB as a medium of online interaction.

So as David Schraub says in the first comment in this thread, Kevin, you're not the target demographic. That demographic is teens/college students/young adults, who have a much greater tendency to get into something like that as a group.

Be careful of joining "skat" groups.

Looking for a simpatico group Kevin?

Try "Bitter USC fans" or "PAC 10 Rulz" or something along those lines.

The whole idea of online social networking is that it allows you to connect with people you know and keep track of them. As David Schraub said, you're probably outside of their target demographic. Originally Facebook was only for college students until they had to start competing with MySpace, but a lot of it is to keep track of friends as they're busy with their active social lives and moving across the country to new jobs.

As for etiquette for adding people as friends, well, that's pretty much up to you to decide. Some people like having as many friends as possible. Others only like having their actual friends as Facebook/MySpace friends. You decide how you want to do it, and that's what matters. Both have their drawbacks and their perks.

And I don't see Facebook's sale as the 90's redux. It's more like having a membership rewards program at your grocery store. For providing the service, the Facebook people have a huge store of knowledge in regard to the people using their systems. As people try to describe themselves and their likes and dislikes to others, they put a lot of information into a huge database. Imagine the marketing potential of knowing the interests of a couple million people entering the job market, soon to have a bunch of actual disposable income at their hands as opposed to student loans and whatever the parents are providing. To be able to use the database to say, "These people will be interested in buying the next generation of gaming consoles, but only one or two and not four or five." Game companies will flock all over that information. Apply it to books, TV shows, radio programming, social activities, political affiliations, food, geographic locations, and you've got a veritable treasure trove of information. People freak out about the NSA wiretapping, but when they provide so much information about themselves freely online, I don't know how much it really matters. Look how Wal-Mart or any store with rewards programs uses the information on what you buy, and think of what you can do with information that people freely provide instead of having to watch what they buy to figure it out.

By the way, I just sent you a friend add on Facebook. I guess I'll see if you take the add everyone or the only add actual friends approach. :)

Well, you can create a Washington Monthly Kevin's Blog Group and instantly pick up 5,000 members. I haven't figured out what that buys the group owner or the members though.

My observation is that kids in the 14-20 range use their Facebook pages, groups, and rings as combination answering machine/e-mail/instant messenger/bulletin board/homework helpline/dating resource. For old folks like us I don't see that it does much.

Wait until your child, niece/nephew, or similar young person in your life rejects your request to be a friend. That is humiliating.

Cranky

Kevin -- you're a quasi-celebrity, so a lot of people are going to be contacting you and adding you.

If you want to use it to keep track of people you actually want to keep track of, change the settings so that people can't find you in searches. That way, the only 'friends' you'll get on facebook are those that you seek out.

Also, I just added you as a friend. Please accept my request so I can poke you. ;)

I just want everyone to know that I adopt a wide stance on Facebook. I' wasn't an intentional poke. Really.

Kevin--

Does this make you the "Pokey Mon"?

I would say "maintaining a sense of connectedness to geographically scattered acquaintances" is the killer feature of Facebook. Which makes it great for college students and recent grads. Also, it seems to be great for the young people flirting, hooking up, and, er, poking. (Ick.)

The $15B valuation is sheer insanity. Unless it isn't. (But I think, probably, it is.)

It wasn't an intentional poke.
Is there a group for people who don't use preview?

Some folks use the Facebook email feature to communicate in preference to other email; it's spam-free, and only your friends have access to it. If you're getting 600 emails a day from unknown spammers, that's a serious advantage.

And the games are fun, even for an old geezer like me (age 62).

My kids are both on it, so it also gives us another way to interact.

Be warned, if you choose to be a promiscuous friend accepter, that there's a hard limit on how many friends you can have (around 5000 friends, according to Robert Scoble). If you accept all your blog readers as friends, you could conceivably hit the limit.

Within a day I had already gotten three or four requests from people I had never heard of, including someone in China. Are they blog readers? Facebook spam? Or what?

They are Republican'ts, hoping to hook up in a men's room at John Wayne airport. Which is somehow appropriate, I feel.

If you poke someone, they get a notification telling them that Kevin Drum has poked them. That's it — though Wikipedia helpfully informs me that "some users construe it as a sexual advance."

Too bad Facebook didn't adopt Unix terminology. Then you could be talking about fingering people (without their knowledge).

You play bridge? I thought almost nobody younger than about 50 plays these days.

I use it to keep in touch with my nieces and nephews. It appears very few people my age (about the same as yours) use it, so it isn't very useful for keeping track of them, at least not yet.

Facebook does three things:
1) It shows people how popular you are, and allows you to compete over who has the most friends, the hippest picture, etc.,
2) Allows the much talked-about geographical connectedness (I have found a couple of college friends I'd dropped out of touch with), and
3) It's a moderately useful centralizing point for a bunch of widgets. For instance, it has a Scrabulous widget, so you can play slow motion Scrabble with friends.
You'd think it would be a place where you could catch up on all the latest social events gossip via news feeds, and it *sort of* is, but actually there was a huge outcry when Facebook started having its newsfeeds publish notes on change in relationship status and so on. It was felt that making those things really obvious generated too much drama.

I've been pretty underwhelmed, honestly.

I agree with the first post that the target demo is really 18-35. But the real genius of Facebook, at least above and beyond having a much cleaner user interface than MySpace, is that it supports all kinds of customized applications. Want to show everyone what music you listen to? Install iLike. Want to show everyone what cities you've been to? There's an app for that.

To be sure, it gets out of hand fast. I have several unanswered invitations to become a vampire hunting zombies, a zombie hunting vampires, a pirate hunting... I'm not sure who, a "Harry Potter photos" request, a "jack o `lantern request", on and on and on without end. Most of the apps are pretty stupid. But the 10% that do something cool make Facebook much much better than Myspace.

News Corp. bought a lemon in MS, which I'm sure will make many of us happy to hear.

I'm using it as an experiment to reach out to undergraduates enrolled in my gigantic intro class at Big State U. I have a page but the real purpose was to create a class page. It's not a substitute for office hours, but slowly students are looking at it. I figured that most of them were on it all the time anyway, so why not give it a go?

Web 2.0, UGC, Social Networking etc is two months from dead.

Git yur start-up going now and sell sell sell!

A program like FunWall can be fun for passing videos and photos back and forth. If you're looking through friends of friends you find a lot of neat content that way.

It's a great place to find relatives you haven't seen in a while. Or knew existed.

I've gotten in touch with a few random people I was really curious about, but whose email I had lost.

People in my demographic - I'm 28 - use it for a few things:
-status messages let you tell people what you're up to and/or thinking about in a large scale
-the events tool makes party invites, if you're going to ask a wide spectrum of people, utterly simple
-many features serve as a proxy as to inter-relations between people. You can figure out about a new person how many people in your trusted group actually interact with them. For instance,of a person's 15 pictures from other, who posted the most pictures of them? Who has written on their wall?

Basically how I think of Facebook is like a Google Reader equivalent for the social lives of your friends. Instead of visiting a lot of blogs, Google Reader consolidates that content for you; instead of inquiring after people's lives, you have that information brought to you periodically.

But God damn, try negotiating the process of changing your relationship status...this isn't necessarily all good.

Instead of visiting a lot of blogs, Google Reader consolidates that content for you

It bears noting that Google Reader is just one implementation of a RSS/Atom feed reader. It's a good one -- I'm transitioning to it -- but it's not like Google invented the genre.

...And it's useless if anyone you want to contact or give information to isn't logged into the system. Which is probably all of your friends...

I have no use for yet another password, this one granting me access to be annoyed by memes and timewasters.

I feel exactly the same way. I think I reached my highest level of social networking and technical expansion with my blog.

I guess I'm too old to care what or with whom my classmates are drinking, flying, etc., especially since most of them are older than me and have never heard of Facebook.

You're too old for it.

Google "rapleaf".

Then go erase everything from your Facebook profile
and disable the account.

All the Tech Security people I have spoken to suggest you *must* be very careful about personal details on Facebook.

In particular *never use your correct birthdate* as this is an extremely common security check for online banking, etc.

There are scraper programs out there, and Facebook is basically exposing your identity to the web.

You forgot the most useful part of Facebook: looking up the girl you're into, finding out which bands she likes, and using that information to woo her. Duh.
See http://xkcd.com/300/ for a perfect example.

Scrabulous. That, and keeping track of acts you're interested in. That's all its good for.

"You play bridge? I thought almost nobody younger than about 50 plays these days."

Well, Kevin is younger than 50, but not by much. I guess he's just a year or so advanced for his age.

It's a good way to keep in touch with friends you don't see or IM very often. Say, your highschool buddies if you've just started college, or say if your move your friends from your old place. It's basically a very accessible customizable bulletin board.

BankingTechy:

If I had a bank that used my birthdate as verification, I would quit that bank. Think about it, birthdate, address, DL number, it's all on one thing we all carry with us every day (driver's license, no?) if that's how secure the techies you are talking to make their networks...

Your reaction is basically the same as mine, Kevin. My friends all seem to love it, but for the life of me, I just don't get what the big deal is. It's nice for occasionally posting photos, but that's about it.

Robert Scoble converted me, as well as about 5000+ people according to some research. See http://scobleizer.com/?s=facebook if you have not yet, it's fascinating read. Robert's title at Microsoft used to be Technical Evangelist. He is good at getting professionally excited, I would even say, ecstatic, about stuff. I could only take 3 months of his Facebook proselytizing before I gave in and joined. Somehow, it all makes sense when he talks about it. But I could not readily repeat his pitch, probably because I have not experienced the same catharsis. I am really trying, though. I can almost see the light.

It looks like you may have signed up for the wrong movie site. According to flixter, they have 35 million profiles. They also have reports of spamming users email accounts to gain members. Try filmcrave.com. There is no funny math there (plus the instant search is way better).