Thing 9: Facebook 2

I like FB for keeping up with family and friends. I have had great success n finding family and frineds and have many "friends" who are close relatives or close friends or co-workiers wiht whom I wna to remain close. I found the greatest majority of them by looking at other relatives/friends/coworker's frinds lists and adding those people.

I do not want to mix my personal life with my business life, so I will not join work relates things on my personal FB. It is possible to have more than one FB account, and I may consider joining one for professional business, but not at this time. There re many ohter ways to network professionally. I do not think using FB for it is a good choice for me right now.

However, my pastor and several other pastors I know or am acquainted with are using FB and Twitter and blogging to keep in touch with their congregations. Because they do this for their congregations, they cannot also use it for family and friends (who are outside their congregations) much. I think the networking aspect of keeping close to your congregation and keeping them informed is great--but it is business. I can see how politicians and other causes (One of my fav's is I Am Second) use FB to keep themselves in the mid of their "fans." When I join these people/businesses as a friend, I am not vulnerable because I have my settings set to "only friends" so 0others cannot see my personal info.

Allowing too many people access to you or your friend's personal info is not a good idea. We must be careful to balance fun and prudence with our info.

Thing 8: Facebook 1

I have just recently created a FB account after mercilessly teasing everyone I knew who already had one. What finally made me capitulate was my DAD saying he posted a wedding picture of him with me on HIS FB! Turns out all my cousins-- over 30 people-- and my aunts and uncles are on FB and have posted pics of the kids etc. That was it for me...we moved away a long time ago and I never felt like I could keep up with my whole big happy family.

When i started FB I stayed on for 3 hours!!! And I found my best friend from HS whom I have not spoken with in 25 years. And of course all the family. I have been enjoying all of that.

The biggest thing that is annoying me about FB right now is that they are about to change the privacy settings for all posts (that's ALL posts) so that they are automatically public unless you purposefully set each one to private. Prior to this change you could set your settings one time and it was done. Form more info on this go to http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2009/06/24/24readwriteweb-the-day-facebook-changed-messages-to-become-18772.html

In addition, as a victim of identity theft, I fear people place too much info on FB-- especially if it becomes even more public than it is. For example, when you post that you are out of town, propel know you are gone and may break into your house, etc---paranoid? Maybe. But the more we get into social networking, the more I feel Big Brother looking over us all, and I don;t think that is a good thing.