If you have a Facebook: Do you like it? Should I get one? Explain your favorite things about facebook?

In 3 minutes I can quickly scan everyone’s messages, and feel like I am keeping in touch with them.
I can quickly post a message, and not need to specify all the family or friend emails to tell them.

Facebook is terribly boring. I never go on there. No one ever says interesting things. I don’t understand what people get out of it… except games. And pictures. It is fun to share pictures, but you can do that in so many other ways without having to bare your soul to an uncaring public.

I have reconnected with people I thought I had lost forever. I also get to challenge my conservative friends a bit and that’s fun. :-)

I think facebook is getting far too invasive. Yes, you can keep in touch . . . with millions of people (the good, the bad and the ugly), but you don’t actually KNOW many.
Yes, you can be trite, serious, boring, funny, anything, but it is far too consuming.
Use it reasonably wisely and it can while away time and don’t believe it as the gospel truth!
As you going to lurch into those teenage years, PLEASE be careful as peer pressure can be very cruel.
Welcome to Fluther – it’s great!

I very recently signed up to Facebook, because my daughter and her husband had moved to Melbourne, Australia (I live in Auckland, NZ), I find it terribly boring be honest, people just seem to write very brief sentences about some aspect of their life/day which feels so shallow to me. What I do like is the chat option, occasionally I catch my daughter or her husband and have a brief encounter with them. I would certainly not be using Facebook if my daughter was still living in the same city as myself.

Many of my friends post links that are fantastic, that I never would have found otherwise. I learn something new every time I log on.

It is also really good for keeping in touch with people who are sort of level 2 or level 3 friends—people you don’t see in person very often (or at all), who you still want to keep up with and invite to parties and stuff.

Speaking of parties and stuff, it makes event planning amazingly smooth and easy.

And there is always the personal validation part. When I have posted about successes or accomplishments, I have always been very touched by how much love and support and congratulations I got; far more than I would have gotten without it.

I enjoy it quite a bit, because I can stay in touch with friends that live all over the country.

It’s nice for staying in touch with people you don’t see very often, but they are kind of an evil company. Facebook tracks and records everything you ever post on there (and also every website you ever visit that contains a “like” button anywhere on the page). They invade your privacy so they can sell your information to advertisers. I don’t ever post anything of a personal nature there and always treat my posts like a future employer may one day be reading it.

Also, be careful of weirdos and perverts! Don’t friend anyone you don’t know in real life. This includes famous people who are really just creepy guys pretending to be a celebrity so they can trick you.

I’ve found it really helpful for sharing various links online, and for keeping in touch with friends who aren’t close friends. And for organizing events, from weekly drinking clubs to birthday parties.

I hate facebook. I think it’s invasive and a risk to personal security, for all the reasons @gorillapaws states. I have one only to keep in touch with friends from a particular local support group I attend, and only because the group uses Facebook to post events. Occasionally I will use the private messaging feature to message people rather than send a text, if I don’t know their mobile phone number.

I made about 700 bucks shorting their stock. I don’t think I have a active account on the site.

I really like facebook for several reasons:

- I can talk to people 7 hours behind me in Canada, and at the same time talk to someone 12 hours ahead of me in Australia

- I can keep in touch with people who would have otherwise drifted out of my life – even if that keeping in touch is just the occasional hi, or less, just being privvy to their status updates

- I can keep up to date with what’s happening in the family, even with more distant members or people that I just wouldn’t end up having a phonecall with

- I can chat to mates online, I can share good things that happen, and it’s lovely seeing all the photos

There are people I know who only visit the site about once a week, and they are also the people who say they have a love-hate relationship with facebook. I think if I only checked it infrequently, I too would not like it. There’s an awful lot of information to process if you only log in occasionally, and you will miss things, then feel left out because other people will be talking about them but you have no idea…

There are several things I would want to get my head around really quickly if I were just signing up for the first time…

- you can switch off all email notifications (have a mooch in the notification settings – settings are top right near your username)

- you can choose to set friends as “acquaintances” (after you’ve become friends, go to their profile, click on the word “friends” and a drop down menu appears).

- you can choose who sees your status updates (drop down menu next to the “post” button)

- your relationship status can be made invisible – you don’t have to share every break-up and make-up!

- you can choose to remove all posts coming to you about a certain game “so and so is playing xxxx, so and so just needs one more pig to complete her farm….” (when the post appears, hover your mouse over it, and a little down arrow will appear top right of the post, click on this and the option to block it is there)

Other things are up to you – you don’t have to post about every meal you’ve eaten, or every nail you break!

Personally, I am so glad facebook didn’t exist when I was a teenager. It’s yet another avenue for the “joys” of teenage friendships to take their toll. That said, as an adult, I love it.

I like it for getting in touch with old friends. I can’t tell you all the people I found from using Facebook. When I was a kid, people didn’t have personal computers, and when someone moved away, you had their address and unless you were good with letter writing, you lost touch. If you lost their address, ditto. Now, I have found childhood friends, babysitters, past boyfriends, neighbors, high school friends, etc.

Like @harple said, people that would otherwise drift out of your life, you can now stay in touch with. I just sent an email to a former coworker the other day and she said she doesn’t use FB much, she prefers to use email. Well, with email, I kind of forgot about her and vice versa and it’s been years as a result. With FB, we would be “in each other’s faces” more and probably not so out of touch with each other.

You can post photos and have everyone have access to them, as opposed to having to email them to each of your friends.

It’s something that is not for everyone, but it seems like people who get into it usually like it.

Only if you’re actually social.

I enjoy Facebook. I post something on it most days but I try not to use it just to inform people that I am having a cup of tea! I enjoy “keeping in touch” (I use that phrase loosely as “keeping in touch can simply mean “liking” someone’s status) with people that I would probably have completely forgotten about had we not reconnected on Facebook ie: people I knew at school etc.