The Perennial Millennial

Why Facebook Rules My Life January 1, 2009

Around my office I am known to be pretty passionate about Facebook and its use in the corporate environment. My boss, who sometimes thinks I am OVERLY passionate about Facebook, recently asked me to list my top ten reasons why I love Facebook. I could only come up with eight, but nonetheless I will share them.

Here they are:

1. 1,000+ friends- Facebook is where my friends “live.” I have over 1,000 friends on Facebook, all of whom I have met before, and I won’t find nearly that many people I know on any other social networking or micro-blogging site. While it is always fun to be a trendsetter in social media, it’s more fun to be right in the center of the networking action.
2. Photo sharing- While Facebook may not be the best place to store photos, it is undoubtedly the best place to share photos on the web. Facebook allows you to “tag” friends in photos and notify them that you are sharing a photo with them. Instead of going on to each of your friend’s Flickr accounts you just sign into Facebook and all of your photos are organized right there.
3. Messaging capability- I love the messaging capabilities of Facebook both for personal use and for use by companies. Personally, it is wonderful to not need to know someone’s e-mail address to send them a message. When you meet someone in class or out at night, all you need to know is their name to drop them a note. For companies, the Facebook messaging capability is especially useful in a Facebook group. The company where I intern, National Instruments, has a Facebook group for their engineering software LabVIEW. The best part about this group is all of the brand’s enthusiasts are in one place and we don’t need to gather their contact information, Hooray! We can message the members of the entire group (up to 5,000 members) with whatever message we want, double hooray!
4. Status updates- I think Twitter is wonderful, in fact I wish that everyone I know would use it. But they don’t, so I depend on Facebook to let me know what my closes friends are up to.
5. Chat- I’m not very much into chat functions, but Facebook chat is wonderful in the same way that the messaging capability is wonderful. You don’t need to know anyone’s screen name and you can sign in and out as you please.
6. Profile Info- Recently I was trying to pick out a Christmas present for my brother’s childhood friend. I have known him my whole life but since I haven’t seen him since last December it isn’t exactly easy to know what to get for him. I logged into Facebook and took a look at his profile, and there before me were a list of all of his interests. BINGO, he has over 30 movies listed and I ended up getting him a 3-month subscription to Netflix.
7. Ease of stalking- This may sound creepy but I assure you it is not. Facebook is the safest place to keep up with people who you may not want to know that you still keep up with them. Elementary school friends, ex-boyfriends and even friend’s moms are all on Facebook and it’s nice to see what they are up to every once in a while. Also, it is incredibly wonderful to see that the third grade mean girl dropped out of college to work at a bar.
8. Free stuff- Facebook applications now make it easier than ever to get more free stuff then you ever wanted. For example, I become a fan of Betty Crocker on Facebook only to receive a free microwave chocolate cake in the mail. Delicious and sweet reward just for using Facebook.

So that’s it, I love using Facebook. And you should too.