facebook

I really want to enjoy it with my friends who do, but it always seems to make me irritated.

I like making profiles about myself, I like seeing other people's profiles about themselves, I like posting pictures and seeing other's pictures, I like being able to write blog-like entries and have people respond, I like sending people cute little gifts or whatever that let them know I'm thinking of them. But I just can't seem to enjoy being on facebook.

I think partly it feels too extraverted. All those random updates on the news feed and the wall about what people are doing and saying to other people on there feels like, well....... like a horribly cluttered room to a neat-freak. I feel beffuddled and overwhelmed, slightly dirty, and, moreover, uninterested. It feels like it's trying to make me a busy body, which is annoying.

I also dislike the sense I get that many people on there assume that because you have a profile your life ought to be an open book to them. Although I don't check it often enough myself, I feel like people I barely know are checking up on my status (or whatever) constantly. What? I don't even talk to them in real life.

Of course that's a BIG part of the problem, there's not a good distinction between actual friends and people who are aquaintances. It feels rude to refuse people you know in some capacity when they ask to add you on there, but they're not really asking to be your actual friend. They have no intention of getting to know you well, hanging out with you, being there when you need someone. They are merely an aquaintance. Furthermore, even if I don't add a lot of these periferal people as my friends, if they know some of my actual friends that I have added, they still get notifications of things my real friends have said or sent to me. They still see the new pictures my friends upload of me. So why even bother to not add them?

They also seem to feel the need to send you millions of notifications apart from the automatic newsfeed ones. Kill the Sith with me, Accept a gift of Strawberries on Farmville, Somebody Hugged you - do something back!, Someone liked the movie you want to see, Someone tagged you in some random note, blah blah blah. Now, don't get me wrong. Some of these activities are fun, or at least look like fun. But somehow they just don't seem to hold my attention long enough to get into them.

I know I know, there are privacy settings, you can turn things off, you can not share your info with applications. Yes, but it seems like all that is what Facebook is all about....so I wonder to myself, why even be on there?

Now, I love making profiles which is why I joined in the first place......but I guess I like them better when they sit there quietly and aquire comments about what I've posted/shared. All these other comments and, and... things just feel like a muddle to me.

The other big problem is the layout and those horrible adds. I hate the adds. Whenever I am on a page with adds I try to leave as quickly as possible - which is every page with facebook. I also hate the way everything is crammed together in narrow collumns with tons of white space all around it. Somehow for me it's just super hard to focus on anything. I don't feel comfortable on any of the pages. ....and I also don't really enjoy the blue.

One last thing I find really annoying about it is that it displays all the most recent pictures of you uploaded by other people first, so people aren't going to see the pictures you like of yourself. Most likely it'll be some awfull group shot where you've got red-eye or something. It's really annoying. And people can just upload pictures of you and tag you in them whenever they like and you can't do anything about it. But not only that - then everyone they know is notified that they've uploaded these pictures. bah!

I'm really toying with the idea of quitting it alltogether.....I don't know. Can I mass remove "friends" and pare it down to just the people I actually know well? - without insulting everyone?
Should I just remove pretty much everything on there, and then just not check it anymore?
I don't know. I really want it to be fun. It feels like it has the potential to be fun.....if it wasn't crawling with all those people I barely know, stupid notifications, and adds!