I admit it. I was a Facebook skeptic for a long, long time. After my very brief flirtation with MySpace (which made my eyeballs bleed from the ugliness of the pages, deafened me with useless background music, frustrated me with the lack of customization and inundated me with countless friend requests from would-be musicians and porn stars), I was slow to even set up a Facebook account, let alone actually start using it.
But here’s the weird thing: Once I finally dared to stick my toes in the water and cautiously start playing with my account, it turned out to be not so bad at all. In fact, it turned out to be a whole lot of fun. I’ve reconnected with some old friends and colleagues, met some new ones, discovered some interesting games, and found another great, fairly harmless way to waste time online.
If you’re like I was, thinking you should give Facebook a try but reluctant to do it, you should probably give it a shot. I bet you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the people you find there, which includes a large and active corps of writerly types, unknown, fairly known and really famous. And as long as you’re relatively cautious about the applications you add to your page and don’t get sucked into too many vampire, werewolf and “Oregon Trail” games, you’ll probably survive just fine.
If you’re already on Facebook or plan on getting there soon, look me up. We’ll be friends, swap a few wall posts, send good karma to each other, and have a rousing game of Scrabulous.
