Facebook is crack! All it takes is one little hit and it consumes your whole world. As my friend described Facebook to his wife, it is World of Warcraft for the social crowd. If you haven’t been bit by the bug you either don’t know anybody to communicate with, don’t have a computer, or believe it is just for the 20 something crowd.
Facebook has steadily been picking up steam. I originally got an account to check up on my Daughter when she went to college. Kind of an easy way to check up without really being there. But soon I started doing searches for people and things I knew…At first it was very hard to find anyone…but then over the last year or so it seems like everyone has gotten the message. So much so I have come to give the prediction that is the title of this entry “Facebook will do away with Reunion.com and Classmates.com”!
I do believe it is true. After playing around with both Reunion and Classmates it became very clear that in the days before Facebook or MySpace it was really the only real destination if you wanted to know what your old classmates were doing. As my own 20th reunion approached it became the site to be on. But there was one big drawback…In order to see anything beyond a name and a year of graduation you had to pay for a subscription. If you wanted to see someones guestbook message, you had to be a paying member. If you wanted to see where someone lived, you had to be a paying member. I dutifully entered all my personal info but always had a problem getting out the credit card and buying that membership. For our reunion we had a site setup where people could leave guestbook comments and post some pictues and get info about the events that were coming up. It was a fantastic concept. It wasn’t long after I got on facebook I started to look up some of these same people that I had went to the reunion with, but now on facebook.
At first very slow going. Not many 40 somethings were that tied into computers or were early adopters of a “Social Networking site”. I mean most of us are married and have kids. The last thing I was going to waste my time on was some dateing/ college web site where people just talked about how drunk they were the night before. I think that was the first image I had of facebook but as I started to use it more I saw where people were also using it for all sorts of other things. From signing up to be a fan of your favorite beer, to joining the cause with others who hate Hillary Clinton, to becoming a fan of your favorite fast food resturant, or signing up to be a fan of Edward from Twilight…It was starting to become much more than just an I outdid your drunken picture site.
That is when I created a group for my High School and started inviting a few of my friends….and just like a crazy pyramid scheme, it started to quickly blossom as they told two friends, and they told two friends and etc. Within a few months there were over 200 people who had joined and then 400 and it is still growing.
The best part and this is why I think that Facebook will kill the class reunion sites, it is all free. If you want to post pictures for others to see you can, nobody has to pay to see them. If you want to email or write on a friends page you can and don’t have to pay. Based on the info they post about themselves you can find out quite a bit. If little Johnny has a sniffel or if someone already I am trying to use it as a main communcation site for contacting my classmates for our 25th and 30th reunion.
Mark my words class reunion sites days are numbered….
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well ur right this whole crap like facebook is really stupid people from all over the world are looking on your profile, and then they know everything about you. Thats why i dont go on any of those sites. A Blog is something elso because you dont have to really write your real nam etc.
I agree social networking sites like Facebook are awesome and the paying subscription for the classmate sites creates problems, but the problem I see with Facebook is you can’t “browse” like you can with classmate websites. With Facebook you have to actually be friends (i.e. actually knew/know them on a personal level) and added to see/communicate with someone whereas on a classmate website you can check out your old crush from 1987 to see if they’re still hot, and do it anonomously. If you weren’t popular in high school, you won’t be able to do a whole lot on Facebook while you can see everyone participating on a classmate website. Just my opinion.