"Can I say you're my girlfriend on Facebook?"

I might try the last inital. I wanted to use MsMisery as nearly everybody knows me as that. Real-life friends I've known in the past few years know me as Samantha as well but not people I was in school with 12 years ago. :(

What is the ILx group called? I could only find my college.

"I Love Music"

yes, where's the ILX group?

I'm not ILM.

i am the small ILM

i finally got on there on friday, so bored was i at work. i was tempted to tick 'we dated' when Dan friended me - i'm mad me.

don't really get this 'poking' thing.

ah.....

don't really get this 'poking' thing.

guess it's a bit like winking on okcupid....

I don't think I'd mind being friended by ex school ppl now. Time is a great healer! I would imagine that if I was tho it would follow the same pattern as with Friends Reunited, a couple of emails back an forth to ascertain what we were doing these days and that would be that.

does anyone bother w/ friends reunited anymore? (i'm guessing not)

I am your friend, Mark!!

I look at Friends Reunited (very) occasionally when they send me an email saying someone has updated their details - which usually is a lie!

There is no-one from my year at school on Facebook, but loads from the years either side. Curious.

Not for a long, long time (xpost x 2).

I've just had an email from someone I've never heard of in my life wanting to add me as a "friend" to Facebook. The cheek of it. It's a disgrace.

Myspace is for Proles. Let us over throw the bourgeois Facebook, all power to the soviets, etc.

That might have been me, Marcello :)

No it wasn't a CJ.

the whole point of facebook is a bunch of randoms calling each other friends.

Registered for Facebook last Friday, immediately re-established contact with people I hadn't seen for 5-6 years. And that's without just randomly typing names of old friends in the search box (which I obviously intend to do next). So it's done its job for old geezers like me, I suppose.

the take-up in the last, like, month of two seems to be huge, based on total lack of statistics.

FR was oddly therapeutic for me since it first came up just after Laura died, so it was quite reassuring when people I hadn't seen for 20+ years got in touch and I had to tell them what had happened and they were all very nice and understanding about it though I haven't really kept in touch with any of them since because, well if you know "Do You Remember Walter?" by the Kinks that sums it up pretty acutely.

If my emailer "CW" was in fact CJ then fair do's and thanks, but being added as a "friend" by people I don't know is pretty creepy, like people coming up to me in the street wanting to hug me or something (not that that ever happens) - you just want to run as far away from it/them as possible.

it's probably an ilxor, MC. this is kind of what you sign up for with facebook!!

fair do's, Marcello Carlin

like people coming up to me in the street wanting to hug me or something (not that that ever happens)

I'm reasonably happy with it, but I see it more as a random person coming up to me and starting a conversation in a pub, which happens quite a lot! So i guess a person's reaction to being friended by someone who is not in fact their friend is largely governed by which real life situation they think it is most like....

the whole point of facebook is a bunch of randoms calling each other friends.

i think for most people i know, it's limited to actual friends. for me at the very least people i've met a few times and like (as opposed to "people i see every weekend"). i've had a few friend requests which i didn't recognise but it was usually because i'd forgotten them rather than didn't know them in the first place.

it does seem to have exploded in the last few months rather and is the first of this type of site that i could actually see being a part of everyday life for normal people in the same way that, i dunno, a mobile phone is - the events thing is really such a handy way of keeping upt-o-date w/ your diary.

pseudonyms on facebook = lame.

what is dud is PRs friending you and then HASSLING YOU VIA THE MEDIUM OF FACEBOOK

I don't mind people getting in touch with me via the blog or ILx or wherever - after all, that's how I met my fiancee! - but the whole MySpace/Facebook "friend" business doesn't really gel; for me the randomness of "friending" in that context is just one step up from URGENT RESPONSE REQUIRED TO NIGERIAN GOVERNMENT CRISIS-type spam.

pseudonyms on facebook = lame.

tell it to little terry lennox

i don't mean "random" in a bad way entirely -- but i wouldn't call someone i'd met a few times a friend (or not 'actual friend'), necessarily. i guess it depends. i only just put my real email addy up, not really sure if i want in.

fear of random weirdos friending you seems to take up about 50% of the chat around facebook, compared to about 1% of actual stuff which happens on facebook. and if you don't like it just deny them!

tell it to little terry lennox

i have done, repeatedly

i don't mean "random" in a bad way entirely -- but i wouldn't call someone i'd met a few times a friend (or not 'actual friend')

well no, neither would i, but facebook friend != actual friend. it's a useful way to keep in contact w/ people who'd otherwise be relegated to "i remember a nice conversation with this person at this party that time" and, you know, make more actual friends

i gave in to the peer pressure and registered a few weeks ago. Haven't met any random weirdos or creeps from the past yet.

myspace>>>>facebook

facebook is basically oldschooltie shit. though, the explosion on facebook has suddenly made myspace look dated and even empty. myspace feels a tiny bit like makeoutclub or lipstickandcigarettes now

facebook is better designed than clunky myspace, if only because it's newer, and despite lacking the 'pizazz' of the latter.

it's the third time i've gone through the process of 'adding friends' after friendster and then these two. progress eh.

with Friends Re-united I could pretty much tell before looking which people in my year at school were going to be on there and which ones would never be on there.

696 otm. but myspace looked horrible and was shitty to use.

it's the third time i've gone through the process of 'adding friends' after friendster and then these two. progress eh.

not including flickr or last.fm

i could live with bad design but the worst thing about myspace was music exploding on you when you didn't want it.

oh yeah, bands embedding their videos in windows media somewhere down the page which then played automatically at the same time you're trying to listen to the tracks in the audio player. stupid.

i.e. bad design

yeah i really meant bad design as in horizontally-scrolling pages, unreadable fonts, shitty backgrounds etc but that works too.

^ agree with all the above. i ended up kind of liking the bad design (again kind of reminded me of makeoutclub) though, all the same, it feels like it should have bad design

i already have a myspazz and i was avoiding facebook, but i got conned into joining by the lure of being able to see photos of a certain friend. but that's the whole problem with it - you can't go perving at anyone's profile unless you're their friend. and apart from my best friend who lives in the states, and an old and vague acquaintance in the uk, my only other facebook buddies are my freakin' workmates (which is pretty lame).

i like myspace. mostly because of a conversation i had on another book forum about a crazy white supremacist who stalked me there, which then led to becoming myspazz friends with someone from that forum, which then led to bestfriendship and possible true love. and another good friend of mine is someone i met on myspazz, and he lives in my city.

and the myspazz crazies who send creepy messages make for good stories at the pub. i had one guy ask me to be his mistress, because he wanted to perform errands and bring gifts to a superior woman.

i dunno what makeoutclub is.

making out is great though.

in terms of how i use it, myspace is barely any different from facebook, except a) more people on facebook b) facebook LOOKS BETTER and also WORKS most of the time - to defend myspazz on these grounds is ridiculous c) less as in no lame bands/whores trying to friend you, i don't understand what ways myspazz could possibly be considered superior except through force of habit

facebook reminds me of school and it has my workmates on it

i don't really have massive issues with either of those

i like that you can make myspace pages look all fucked up and shit with pictures.

when i'm bored at work i jazz up my 'spazz page... i mean, it's hardly brain surgery, it's just a bit of a piss. one of the best things about it is how many great artists i've discovered. because my profile is quite arts-centred, and i have a ton of pictures up, it seems to attract a lot of people with similar tastes, which then leads to discovering new artists who have profiles. i avoiding putting any personal pics, or pics of myself, up for a long time, but then they got the new photo album set-up, which allows you to block anyone but friends from viewing them.

myspace and facebook seem to have very different motives - fb is more for connecting with people you actually know (or used to know) while the 'spazz is more for meeting new people.

i already have a myspazz and i was avoiding facebook, but i got conned into joining by the lure of being able to see photos of a certain friend. but that's the whole problem with it - you can't go perving at anyone's profile unless you're their friend.

Facebook is much better than MySpace for all of the design reasons just mentioned, but unless you're a student, there are still way more people on MySpace. When I joined a year ago, I had to add my 23-year-old gf's roommates just to look like I knew people. This does seem to be slowly changing, though.