OK, I Admit It - I Love Facebook!

Electronic ink never dries. Which can lead to embarassment if you blog about how rubbish something is and then subsequently become its biggest fan a short time later (isn't that right, John? ;-)

So it is that less than two months since I blogged about my disinterest in Facebook, I now have to report that I consider it to be the bee's knees. Sometime last month that I hit a personal "tipping point" whereby a sufficiently large number of friends had added me to their buddy list that I figured I ought to give it a try, and now I find that it's the second site I visit of a morning, ahead of Google Reader, BBC News and my bank account, and behind only GMail. I commend my employers for blocking access to the site, otherwise I'm sure that my productivity would suffer.

I appreciate the arguments for not creating "walled gardens" on the web, but equally it's in my interest to create content where it will be seen by my desired audience. I'll stick with Flickr for photos, and this blog for my musings, but in terms of keeping my network of friends up to date with what I'm up to, and generally keeping in touch, Facebook is proving to be ideal. It also renders the ridiculous Twitter obsolete.

What else?  I love that it's a fantastic application platform - thousands of people have already created (admittedly mostly silly) applications on Facebook, and I'm vaguely considering learning FBML and giving it a go myself.

I love the ability to "tag" individuals in photos, so that I get notified when new images of myself or my friends have been uploaded.

I love looking through my friends' lists of friends, reminding myself of old acquaintances, and getting back in touch.

It's ace. I was wrong to dismiss it on April 19th. I don't know if the rumours of Microsoft consider offering up to $6 billion for Facebook are true or not - on pure earnings ratios it sounds utterly ridiculous, but remember that it is only nine months since Google paid $1.65 billion for YouTube - we live in interesting times indeed.

What are you waiting for?  Add me as a contact!