No There There

People have started bugging me to join Facebook. I'm not going to do it. Here's why:

There is nothing I want to do on Facebook that I can't already do with other long-established, very available familiar programs. I have email, and although I don't instant message (for several reasons, which are similar to why I don't join Facebook) I could hook that up in a heartbeat. I can send emails and include funny pictures or links to other interesting stuff as fast as I can write them and click on attachments. Likewise my friends can send me emails with stuff in them as fast as they can write them. It's just a few clicks, and the messages themselves. Even if they only want to grunt at me like a caveman, they can put those grunts on handy MP3 files, and attach them to emails. God help us all if they actually start doing this, however. But it is easy to do.

I have a website, and my friends can put it on their favorites list if they want to. It's just a click away. They can, in fact, open many internet windows at once, and keep a bunch of their friends' blogs open all the time. I do a bit of this myself. I have a couple of websites open right now in other windows. I click to look at what's happening on them. Easy.

Not only that, I could download music directly to my friends without using a website. I can do all sorts of things that appear to be "magic" to many people.

I have a series of specially programmed "radio" stations on Pandora I could share with people if they were interested. I could listen to my friends' special programmed radio stations. But they won't do it. God knows why. I guess because it's not on Facebook.

I can link my friends in an instant to cool Youtube videos. Everyone does this. I don't need Facebook to do this.

There are about 5 million interesting puzzles, quizzes and such things on the internet already. There have been for years. Not to mention articles. To read. There is a lot of stuff out there that is damn interesting.

What I think is weird is people who join Facebook - or MySpace - and then disappear from the rest of the wired world. It's like a cult, worse than Scientology, worse even than AOL. AOL people quit writing altogether, they just send monstrously recursive emails with attached emails with attached emails with attached emails and 12 to 15 layers down you find a LOLcat or some misinformation disproved five years ago on Snopes.


Someone once talked me into joining MySpace. (And yes, I understand that MySpace is no longer considered cool.) Every time I clicked on their page, their music started blaring at me. It didn't ask if I was already listening to music, which I usually am. But it was a dead zone. A lot of hookers wanted to be my friend...

I opted out of MySpace. They used to send me a lot of spam. Just what I needed.

"What I'm trying to explain, is that it's useless crap," Jumper explained. And then he was gone.

UpdateFriday 27
I decided to renew the war on the word "blog." It is time. It's going to be an uphill struggle. This is, after all, hosted by Blogger. The software itself refers to "the blog."

This is a website. See here or here