Testing Facebook
Yesterday, I received the following message in my email inbox:
I heard a rumor that founder and President of the Low Tech Times has signed up for a Facebook account. Can you confirm or deny?
Kevin
The rumor is false. I do not have a Facebook account. On Wednesday evening, my friend Mike R. let me test out Facebook using his account. This testing was the most likely cause of the rumor.
After messing around on the site, I can see why many people are addicted to Facebook. While it was interesting to look people up on Facebook and read what they had to say, I still think there are good alternatives to Facebook available.
Facebook Alternatives
- Email — Email allows for easy communication between friends. You can send messages to one or more people, keep in touch, attach pictures, etc.
- Blogging — If you want to post something for the world to see, you can easily start a blog with WordPress. By uploading content to Facebook, you are essentially giving your content away for free so that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg can get rich off of your work. While you should not expect to make much money by blogging, I still think it is better to make a little something with Google adsense on your own blog rather than letting Facebook profit by running ads against your content.
A Reason to Join Facebook?
The only reason I can think of to sign up for a Facebook account is to drive traffic to my own sites. Does anyone use Facebook to promote their own websites? If so, how effective is it?
4/1/2010 Update: There is a more recent version of this post.