I've discovered Facebook...

.. and it may be about to take over my life.

It all started quite innocently. A young chap, whom I used to reside with, sent me an invite. At first I ignored it. I have tried the odd social networking site before but they turned out to be just that - odd! After a while I grew curious, or perhaps just bored, and as it is my job (kind of) to keep abreast of web and internet technologies I decided I should really investigate this further so I signed up with my spam email account.

It was okay. I managed to converse a little with said chap, and look at some photos of him and then I got Facebook to check my address book and discovered another old London pal was on there. This particular girl has been incredibly difficult to keep in touch with since I left the UK. We've chatted on occasion over MSN but the time difference has keep that to a minimum and she NEVER answers her emails. So obviously, I was quite pleased to re-establish contact. Her comment so glad you are on facebook, I live on here! hehe disturbed me somewhat. What on earth could she possibly be doing on there? I wondered.

Then I forgot about it for a week or so until Friday came around again. With the Rugby Super 14s done and dusted I was at a loss of what to do, given that Friday afternoons were generally spent planning my team and making trades, so I ventured back into the world of Facebook again. What a surprise when I discovered that some of my York Uni and London buddies had added me as their friends. How did they find me? But how wonderful! I spent the afternoon trying to figure out how the whole thing worked, reading their banter and checking out their photographs. I invited a couple of people from work and we had fun writing on one another's walls, although admittedly that wore thin pretty quickly.

Then I forgot about Facebook again. Until the following Friday at which time I decided to get Facebook to check my address books again. This is a kind of creepy, yet cool feature, whereby you stick in your email address, be it Yahoo, GMail or Hotmail, and your password, and armed with this information, Facebook trundles off, logs in and looks for email addresses in your address book that match any it has in its own database. If it finds any matches, it lets you know and you can add those people to your list of friends. I've done this a few times now and each time, Facebook has found more people that have joined up. You can invite people too but so far I have refrained from doing this (unless people have specifically requested) just to avoid being too much of a pain.

My facebook profile

So, my network is growing and I'm in touch with a lot of old friends from the UK who I never get around to emailing. It's great. People ask me what's the point of Facebook, and I admit that I wondered that myself, but one thing I really like is that when I log in it gives me a summary of recent events, such as "So-and-so and Mr Bloggs are now friends", "You have one friend request", "You have 1 message in your inbox", "Thingumyjig has added photos" "Whosit has tagged you in 2 photos" etc. etc. etc. Basically it's a one-stop shop for communication. Somehow it seems easier than emailing people and remembering a multitude of photo sites and blog addresses. That said, obviously I'm still blogging and I'm still uploading photos to my Picasa site.

And in other news...
Some of you may have noticed that the link to my photos hasn't been working properly. I am investigating this and in the meantime I have replaced the link with one to my Picasa album. It doesn't have all the photos up there but there are some recent ones for your perusal.

Oh yes, I knew there was something else.... for those of you who don't know I am now the proud owner of a beautiful diamond engagement ring (thank you, Toby, photo to follow) so I guess this makes it all official (good thing given the wedding is only 8 weeks away) and our landlords are selling our house from under our feet (great timing, you [insert appropriate expletives here]).