I finally got round to getting a Facebook Account. I have been resisting the momentum that is Facebook for some time, but was finally persuaded, in part because of my mates at Crossfit Manchester who entered the English Indoor Rowing Championships and had posted pictures and videos up on Facebook. Iif you’re interested, feel free to send me a friend invite: Colin McNulty’s Facebook Profile
I followed I’m sure a typical process of looking for friends via friends of friends, and in groups from previous employment and schools. What surprised me however, was just how rubbish the friend search function is! The problem with Facebook is that there are sooo many people that even rare names typically return dozens of hits and it’s not always straight forward working out who is your friend based on some dodgy picture. Worse, any kind of location search doesn’t seem to work either. It’s really surprisingly poor.
The ability to tie it into a YouTube account is a nice feature, so now whenever I post a new youtube video, it’ll automatically get sucked into my Facebook profile. (See all my videos at: Colin McNulty on YouTube.) At first I was excited by the similar looking RSS feed too.
So I dutifully setup my Facebook profile to import the RSS feed from this blog and it certainly it worked, the titles to my last 10 blog posts appeared on my Facebook Wall. But it was a disappointment. Clicking the links didn’t take me to this blog, but instead to a Facebook hosted copy of my post, less all the videos and pictures. Not at all what I wanted. So I’ve removed the RSS feed, which is a shame.
After a couple of weeks in I have about 100 “friends” and have contacted some people I haven’t spoken to since school. It’s nice to know they are still alive and note that in most occasions busy procreating. More interesting however is the people I thought were going to be there, but aren’t. There are several friends I had at school for example that I can’t find anywhere on Facebook or on the web at all. What happened to them?
- Did they die?
- Are they in prison?
- Are they slumming it on a beach in Bali?
I don’t know, but if your name is Paul Coggins, Jonathan Handle or Simon Deeves and you went to Emmbrook School in Wokingham, hey, get in touch! 😉
