Facebook. What's the draw?

I prefer facebook over myspace for my social life. I post pictures and vids and chat with my friends. For me it’s simple and that’s why I like it. For commercial reasons I would do myspace. In fact I use myspace for my photography profile and to show off work. Nothing more.

It depends how well you use it. Me and my friends constantly upload videos and photos, and being able to be tagged/tag other people in such stuff is fun. If the people you know don’t use Facebook that well, then it’s probably not going to be that good.

The first caveat for most people is that they can’t decorate their own page, but you soon get over it once you have a couple hundred photos, and you’re getting notifications about people uploading photos of you .etc .etc.

99.99999% of the apps are awful. There’s some good ones, like Flickr and Vimeo. Fluther for Facebook is also in the pipeline, last time I gathered. It’s about finding the good apps… it’s a shame there isn’t more quality control.

Sorry for this half assed reply, I’ll probably expand more later but I have quite a bit of work to do. :)

Oh, and I know some companies that have had experienced amazing promotion by creating Facebook pages and groups. But if you’re a small photographer, band or other artist, it’s probably not going to help you in the same way MySpace does… by design, really.

I prefer Facebook for a number of reasons, the main one being that most of my friends and family use it over MySpace. I think I also find myself preferring the cleaner, more organized look of it. All too often I’d go to someone’s MySpace profile to find that 1.) it took forever to load and 2.) that they tend to be horribly obnoxious (glittery GIF files and horrible background images kill me). Granted, that obviously doesn’t apply to everyone’s page, but it was my general experience and it turned me off a great deal. I suppose there just wasn’t any real benefit for me to stay with MySpace; none of the conveniences seemed great enough for me to tolerate what I didn’t like.

I hate, hate hate hate, music that starts automatically when you look at someone’s profile. What an awful idea that was.

@Richard: They’ve had a fix for that for a couple of years now… at least, for people using most flash-based music players. On occasion someone will simply embed their own java/html player that Myspace can’t help with. When that happened, they get bahleeted from my friends list :)

I use Facebook for seeing and downloading photos of my grandkids. Period. The rest is a lot of garbage, in my humble opinion. I wouldn’t touch MySpace with a ten foot pole. Someone described it to me as like being in a messy teenager’s room, complete with dayglo posters and loud music. I have to agree. I have seen nice MySpace pages but they are few and far between. I’ve tried working with it (for a client) and it was a nightmare for me. Plus the spam is outrageous, and the banner ads are prolific and of questionable content. For professional purposes, I prefer my own domain, or other sites, such as Squidoo.

I hate myspace. To me it always seemed so…..(how to put this delicately)....2nd grade?

@richardhenry: apps are no longer the problem on the facebook. The new re-design solves the application problem by de-cluttering the profiles

@mirza: Totally agree. The redesign has it’s flaws (beta, after all), but it’s a helluva improvement.

Heh… if you think Facebook is too bland and uptight, don’t even think about heading over to LinkedIn.

@richard: see this – andrew wilkinson’s excellent attempt at solving the new facebook’s design flaws

I like Facebook because it’s sort of like Big Brother. It tells you damn near every move someone makes, every time they post on the wall of a mutual friend… sure maybe it’s just being nosy but you find things out that you might not have otherwise.

I started using Facebook when it first came out as a way to keep in touch with my friends at the college I attended and at neighboring universities. In that respect, it was private and felt a little safer than other sites because it required you to have a .edu email address. Even though the media has taken a profound interest in it over the past year, it’s been a daily part of many college students/recent grads’ lives for around four years. It’s easy to stay with something if you and all of your friends are on it.

Facebook hands down…atleast then I don’t get friend requests from hot models that don’t exist. Most my friends use it, and like Poofandmook said, it’s kind of like big brother which is weird, but it keeps you in the loop really well.

And I don’t like Tom for some reason.

Well, here in Chile there was asudden explosion of facebook, and now everybody is logging into it. The main reason i think people are using Facebook is its versatility and control over permissions and content

i dont like facebook….i really dont like the profiles…there is nothing to do with it…i think i have a account, but i dont know the login anymore…i love sites where i can costumize my profile, change the layout and something. i dont like it when my profile look like all the other profiles…
hope you understand my english isnt very good…