Facebook vs Email
My friends and I were having an interesting discussion last night about Facebook. Now Simone and I are quite into it and the other two guys, they were not. Wei-Yen is somewhere in the middle, he's a Facebook sympathiser.
Why is Facebook so much more popular than email as a way to re-communicate with lost friends? I had an earlier discussion about this and it may be because of the following reasons 1) too formal 2) has a lower chance of someone replying 3) gets lost in all the spam 4) people change their email addresses constantly. Whereas Facebook is a little more accessible - at least when you know that the person is 'active', you can send a one-liner to say "hey you, how's it going? Where are you now?" and they will get a 'notification' in their inbox to tell them that you've posted something.
The point about MSN also came up - why don't you just chat with them? Now this is a little different, in the day of instaneous gratification people are also starting to protect their time more and don't like to be interrupted - hence you have to leave voice messages etc. Facebook (and its counterparts) offer the deferability of email without the formality.
So the next time you go to email your friends, why don't you just go to their "wall" and post a message? Chances are they'll go and read your "notes" which are updates of what you're up to. I still love mass emails though ^.^
Just for some fun, we also talked about this youtube video which is sure to make you wonder what people do with your profile... ;)
Why is Facebook so much more popular than email as a way to re-communicate with lost friends? I had an earlier discussion about this and it may be because of the following reasons 1) too formal 2) has a lower chance of someone replying 3) gets lost in all the spam 4) people change their email addresses constantly. Whereas Facebook is a little more accessible - at least when you know that the person is 'active', you can send a one-liner to say "hey you, how's it going? Where are you now?" and they will get a 'notification' in their inbox to tell them that you've posted something.
The point about MSN also came up - why don't you just chat with them? Now this is a little different, in the day of instaneous gratification people are also starting to protect their time more and don't like to be interrupted - hence you have to leave voice messages etc. Facebook (and its counterparts) offer the deferability of email without the formality.
So the next time you go to email your friends, why don't you just go to their "wall" and post a message? Chances are they'll go and read your "notes" which are updates of what you're up to. I still love mass emails though ^.^
Just for some fun, we also talked about this youtube video which is sure to make you wonder what people do with your profile... ;)
posted by Amy at 12:53 AM
1 Comments:
agree - facebook is faster and less formal. And you can stay in touch with many people in one place (website in this case). Also through seeing people's status or photos they uploaded or anything like it, you're prompted to post something to them while normally you would send them two emails per year with Christmas and birthday wishes.
Keep wondering if such sites don't make us even more lazy than we already are, but on the other hand it keeps me stay in touch with many more people than so far.
No easy answer to that one...
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