Facebook and a Running Mate\nby Barry Bauer
\nI’ve been on Facebook for a few years and now find that it’s become something more than just keeping up with friends and family. I get “friends requests” and a lot of them have come from people I don’t even know. Out of curiosity I accepted them and now I’m re-thinking that decision.
\nIt’s not so much about what’s happening in their lives as it is about posting things I call, “Facebook posters.” They’ve got pictures on them, a little poem, something religious, or somebody’s artwork, etc. It goes on and on and it’s more stuff than I need to go through. I don’t mind seeing a few of them but then some people get carried away. I had one person who posted fifteen of these posters in a row on my wall which meant I had to go through two or more pages to get to something I really wanted to read. I finally blocked that person. Just one blocked sender uncluttered my wall quite a bit.
\nAnd then there’s a Facebook group called, “You know you grew up in St. Johns (or close by) Michigan if.” This is a great idea and allows people to get together and share memories growing up here.
\nI’ve only been on the site a short while, but already I’ve stirred up a hornet’s nest. I started to notice people either advertising their small businesses or just getting on and posting idle chatter about something that has nothing to do with the site.
\nI posted that we’re losing this site and got a few replies agreeing with me. A lot of people either didn’t reply or it didn’t matter to them one way or another if advertisement was allow. One person took it very personally and accused me and whoever agreed with me of trying to run the show. No matter what anybody said to this person in their mind the definition of memories is; free advertisement and lots of people in one location.
\nI’ve been around long enough to know that once a bad idea is born you can’t get rid of it and the problem it creates only gets worse. This is the same thing that’s happened with Facebook posters. One day there’s one on your wall and the next day there’s thirty of them.
\nWhat’s to become of advertising on the memories group? I don’t know, they’re taking a poll right now.
\nAs you can see I haven’t learned to keep my thoughts to myself; but I did learn two words on Facebook this week, “Bump” and “Thread.”
\nBump means: “to post a reply to it purely in order to raise the thread’s profile. This will typically return it to the top of the list of active threads.”
\nThread means: “a sequence of responses to an initial message posting. This enables you to follow or join an individual discussion in a newsgroup from among the many that may be there.”<\/p>\n