25 July 2007
Facebook is becoming a problem for me. On a daily basis I spend about an hour throwing food at friends, eating chomps of zombie-friends, updating my status, and looking for old schoolmates. I spend another hour watching friend’s photo albums, controlling my groups, read and write on walls, and searching for other fun applications.

Not ever has a social networking site kept me this busy in an enjoyable way. I’m also on Hyves (a Dutch social network) and MySpace (currently the biggest social networking site in the world).

Hyves is just not good enough because it doesn’t really allow me to keep in touch with international friends but limits it to my Dutch friends. And above all: it seems to target 14-year olds. OK, I’ve also pimped my Hyves-page (such a high school-type thing to do) but now it just takes forever for the page to download.

And MySpace? Also, it is just not good enough. The amount of spam from crappy bands and upcoming pop stars is insane. Most of the pages, not mine, have pictures in the background, again: this takes ages to download. People are also not updating the site constantly, and if they do I can’t see that they did. And how much fun is it to tag friends in photos? I can’t do that on MySpace.

It affects us all
I am definitely not the only one who’s addicted to Facebook. At the moment I have about seventy friends in South Africa alone and judging by the amount of time they change their status or write on a wall I can conclude that this affects us all.

Funny also how I have about twenty Facebook friends who all live in Grahamstown; we live close to each other, have one another’s cell phone numbers, and bump into each other on an almost day-to-day basis in town or on university grounds. It’s kind of nice though: if I don’t feel like talking to them in the supermarket all I have to do is quickly pass and shout “I’ll see you on Facebook”!

According to Alexa statistics South Africa is ranked the sixth biggest Facebook user in the world, followed closely by Egypt and Puerto Rico on the fifth and fourth rank.

Future employers
I recently read how universities and companies now use Facebook to check up on students or future employees. Scary for some people ‘cause they might be caught out drinking or doing other funny things like we all do. I’m actually happy with the fact that future employees can see what I do in my spare time; judging by my CV I look pretty dull as a media theorist or nerd.

All in all, I’ve spend quite some time writing this blog. My heart is starting to race, the palms of my hands are getting sweaty and my fingers want to type a very familiar address on top of this page. You can guess where I’m going to spend the rest of the afternoon.