How I use facebook

Published by Helen | Filed under Social Media

Todd Jordan asks what Facebook apps we can’t live without, but to me the conversation lacks something if we don’t talk about how we use Facebook and the apps embedded in it. In other words, I can only tell you about what applications I use if I also tell you the why I use them, because, ultimately it’s a total YMMV situation. (One of my taglines, presently buried on another site, is that your mileage not only may vary, but should.)

Facebook is one of my content distribution channels. I’m there on a professional basis maintaining pages that pull in RSS feeds of the sites they are associated with, and keeping an eye on groups that I created for people to have a social space associated with the respective sites.

Because many of the friends I have on Facebook are through those two sites, there’s particular venn diagrams associated with how I use the service. I use the playlist.com API to embed my playlists and I use iLike to share music with those who came into my COIs from my music critic days.

I use the shared links and notes function to distribute content to the 60+ people who friended me because of my vocational work in the Episcopal church.

I’ve stopped using the status update as much since finally getting on twitter, but I do still use it to provide, well, status updates, since Twitter has become a conversation tool for me.

To express my personality, I love the pieces of flair app — when I was a teenager we actually wore those buttons on our jackets with the collars turned up, long before it became a joke on Office Space.

I feed my blog into the platform, too. I need to update this over the weekend, because I migrated my blog to a hosted wordpress version and haven’t updated my feeds yet.

Lastly, I use facebook to stay in touch with old friends (although LJ remains the best place for this), find lost connections, and to keep an eye on my teenage son, who’s living with his dad these days.

But scrabulous remains my poison, and I’m so glad to be able to play my favorite turn-based game asynchronously with all the folks in my various circles of influence. I just wish Hasbro would give it its blessing!