Eric is non-existent (at least as far as Facebook goes).

Once you have a take on Android, I’d be interested to hear it.  My last attempt to have have a discussion about this game went off on a tangent pretty quickly.

Jay,
I’m not ready to write a review of Android, but I’ll say that one reason I didn’t like it is that I didn’t really feel like I was solving a crime.  I didn’t feel like I was involved in a choose your own adventure board game (which you might expect based on the plot cards). 

But I don’t mind abstract.  I also don’t mind long, so that isn’t the problem.  I will happily spend 2+ hours collecting cubes and round cardboard coins and never care that it doesn’t feel like I’m building a castle and a city in Caylus.

Part of the problem, I think, is that I didn’t feel like I was making interesting decisions in Android--either long term or tactically.

I’m on Facebook primarily as another way to stay in touch with the high school students I work with (at school & at my church).

“Friending” people is a tricky problem.  I only accept invitations from people I know for sure (some “Matt Carlson” keeps trying...) but I’m still getting a bad signal to noise ratio of all the updates… Of course, I don’t use Facebook all that much anyway.  (I use my cell phone only as a phone...)

For those looking to slim down their Facebook friends, you can delete 10 friends and earn a free Whopper at Burger King… my favorite internet promotion so far!

I admit I don’t really get Facebook.  I am on it (and Myspace) in order to vet out some interviewees prior to my interview with them, but otherwise I don’t use it much. 
D

Dale,

Obviously you think it’s okay, but do you have any ethical qualms about judging people professionally based on their personal web presence?  I certainly don’t where to draw the line, and I can’t argue that how a person conducts himself away from the workplace says nothing about how he might behave in it, but the pre-interview Facebook search feels a bit Orwellian to me.

Jay,
Yes - I think it’s perfectly appropriate to use Facebook and Myspace to look up information on candidates.

The way I see it is—no one has compelled the person to put anything on Facebook.  If I can see it (without Friend status), so can the rest of the world.  It behooves me to find out everything I can about my candidates in order to properly assess them.

Let’s face it, if I can see John Doe’s drunken escapades from Spring Break, so can the rest of my business partners.  Do I want to jeopardize the professional reputation of my own company by allowing others to see things like this too?

I have always been frankly appalled by the amount and quality of content that people allow to be posted of themselves on social networking sites.  Yes, it’s cool and funny, but once things are up on the Internet for the public to see, you lose control of that information.  People can modify it or place it out of context - and this can end up being embarassing or perhaps even harmful as a result.

But, this is not to say that I don’t like Facebook or disapprove of it.  I am on it at least once a week for my own social purposes.  My current friend roster includes only people that I really want to know what they’re doing. (I’ve never understood those folks who have 100+ friends, some of whom they’ve only met once at a gaming convention—like you really care about what they’re doing). 

But, everything on Facebook about me is Private.  (Just try searching for me!) I’ve been doing this long enough from the “Big Brother” side to know that there’s nothing that I want of my private life to be posted there. 

Orewellian or not, the Facebook/MySpace search is a part of the modern job vetting process.  Anyone who thinks that these techniques are not being used is sinply putting themselves at a large disadvantage in the overall process.  And, while though things may seem cool or funny to put online while in high school and college, I wish more people would see that there are significant ramifications that can come from this information being available.

Dale

Since I have lived in a few different countries, Facebook has been great to find and keep in touch with people too far away for me to see in person often.  That’s why I signed up for it in the first place.  But it’s been helpful for contacting others such as family far away.  And find long lost friends from the past.  And some of my boardgaming friends.

And Magdar LavaDemon.  All should befriend Magdar on Facebook or he might throw boulders at you, sneaky dwarves.

It is a tricky thing to communicate to high school students how what they put up on Facebook (public OR private) should be filtered a little bit.  (That age, public & private are fairly blurred as so many of them are friends with each other, etc...)

As a teacher I find I need to be particularly careful of my entire web presence…

I’ve never understood why people have so many “friends” on facebook. For example, my neighbor, who I know initmately and hang out with on a daily basis (we are both stay at home parents) probably talks/chats with maybe 6 different people in any given week. She has 118 “friends”!

I have 20 friends and probably 13 of those are people in my local boardgaming group who I see 1-2 times a week. I don’t think I could get 118 friends on facebook if I tried!

good reason no. 146849 to use facebook:

gametable online allows you to play games through it..like guillotine. Otherwise, I signed up and abandoned mine for the most part.

Since I have groups of friends in different parts of my life (gaming, dancing, hi-tech, local, etc.), I set up several Friends lists on Facebook containing subsets of my friends.  Then, you can quickly toggle among different feeds (all versus a feed filtered by a Friends list) to overcome a high noise to signal ratio.

Facebook for me is primarily the ultimate lovechild of MySpace and Classmates.com.  I am in touch with a LOT of people I went to high school and college with, as well as several CABS members and other odds-and-ends individuals.

The interface is about 5 billion times better than MySpace, and it has many great utilitarian functions.  I use the CABS group as just one more means to pass around information about upcoming meetings and such, though I’ve not yet gotten Bud to the point where he’s posting shots from the meets on the group page.

I’m pretty open about who I friend, as I don’t get as many requests as I give out.  It’s a good way for me to have someone close at hand to contact and catch up with, but I don’t have to follow their every move by any means.  Some of them are only on once or twice a week anyway, whereas I am on daily.

One thing I do not do is all the stupid apps that are on there.  I did Flair because I’m amused by it, the BGG link to show off my board game collection, and Pandora because it is the most awesome music service ever.  That’s pretty much all.  You don’t really need it, you can just post pics, videos, the occasional note/blog, chat up your friends and it’s everything you need for social connection.

The hardest part for those of us who predate the MySpace generation is getting used to the new idea of multipoint communication.  Instead of one-to-one interaction, the social sites and microblog services and Web2.0 metawhatever sites all make use of The Cloud (tm).  It’s a totally different way of communication and it’s not always easy to see right away how to turn it to one’s advantage.

I agree with Steph about the multipoint communication and learning how to leverage it.  Find some good web2.0 articles and read them if you haven’t.

As to Vals “Unfortunately, the status updates of the friends I keep in touch with were getting lost among the notices from people I may have only met once (or not at all).” May I suggest trying the “More about Person X / Less about Person X” under options next to their status on the home.php page? It will cut down the casual friends and highlight the people you never want to miss.