Yesterday, I have given in to peer pressure and curiosity and now have a Facebook account. Feel free to add me to your friend list* and write on my wall, but don't count on me to be too active there. I don't even know how many different accounts I have! There's LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, and of course blogger, there is yahoo, wordpress, gmx, t-online, rogers, and numerous accounts that come with domains I've registered. I think I have a digg account as well, one at MySpace and at SecondLife and probably some more that I've completely forgotten about. I hardly use any of that with notable exception of Google. Is all of this actually good for something?
So far, I find Facebook really nice, it is well organized and I like the Mini Feed telling me things like Soandso is looking forward to playing golf on the weekend, and Soandso can't find her glasses. I.e. another way to numb my brain if it runs hot.
Besides this, I have tried to join the network of Frankfurt University where I made my PhD. They sent a confirmation email to my university account. I haven't checked that for a year or so. I had set up the spam filter to deleting messages every month. Nevertheless, I couldn't open the inbox. It just shows "You have 62,802 unread messages."
* ... if you do so, please add detail 'worked together' on 'blogosphere' or send me a message that refers to this blog. I actually don't want to randomly add people to my friends list who just like my photo or so.
"You have 62,802 unread messages." They are all valid vacua adding to the landscape. See what happens when you quantize gravitation?
ReplyDelete;-p
ReplyDeleteI solved the problem by writing an email to 'trouble@uni-frankfurt...' and asked them to delete all but the one which was relevant. Seems all one needs is a competent system administration.
"You have 62,802 unread messages"
ReplyDelete;-)... yeah, there are about 200 spam mails on a typical workday on these accounts...
BTW, concerning facebook, that's a funny coincidence, the title page of this week's edition of the German newspaper Die Zeit has an article "My data are free" about facebook. The focus of the article is on privacy issues: The author is a bit puzzled how much personal data facebook users are ready to share and give away to everyone on facebook and other social networks. But he concedes that one has an option to block the free dissemination of personal data, and that the companies care about privacy.
On a less serious note, I was wondering if I may not be already a bit too old for facebook etc ;-), but the Zeit article has the reassuring info that nearly half of the users of facebook are 35+..
Best, Stefan
Hi sabine, i added you as a friend in my facebook account. I'm a physics grad student.
ReplyDeleteglenn