Originally, Facebook was available only to college students with .edu email addresses. The site is now open to the public and is quickly becoming a favorite over MySpace for young adults who want to stay in touch with friends. If you want, you can add me at www.facebook.com/people/Alan_Lastufka/625314358 (URL 12.1). Facebook offers a solid private messaging system that allows you to email with your friends from any computer. You can add friends and receive updates via Facebook when your friend has a birthday, hosts an event, or publicly posts an update about what's going on in their lives.
If you want to use Facebook as a promotional tool, you can also post links to your videos, your personal site, and announcements about events like upcoming live shows.
Most people feel more comfortable sharing themselves on sites like Facebook because, unlike YouTube, their Facebook updates are private and available only to the friends they've added. Anyone can subscribe to you on YouTube or watch your videos without even having an account on YouTube, but for lurkers to view your posts on sites like Facebook, they must request that you add them as a friend, and you must approve that friend request.
Facebook is simple enough to join and use, but if you get stuck, O'Reilly has a wonderful step-by-step book all about Facebook entitled Facebook: The Missing Manual. Check it out here:
| http://tinyurl.com/5rt86r (URL 12.2) |
Additional similar sites are www.myspace.com (URL 12.3), www.xanga.com (URL 12.4), www.linkedin.com (URL 12.5), and http://programmermeetdesigner.com (URL 12.6). MySpace seems to have been taken over by teenyboppers who consider the pinnacle of social interaction to be sending grade-school "Do you love me?" surveys to each other. Xanga seems to me to be sort of a "not sure what it wants to be, so it's got a little bit of everything but not much focus" site. LinkedIn is a good site if you're a freelance worker of any kind and want to network with potential employers or collaborators. ProgrammerMeet Designer is a networking site specifically for computer programmers.