Facebook in a nutshell -or two-

If you are familiar to this blog you`ve realized by now that I don´t like Facebook very much.

I have two reasons for that:

• There is always a continuous crossing of boundaries (personal vs professional).
• You always have to check on new indiscrete applications -or just avoid them-. If not carefully understood their impact, this applications may invade your "friends" space.

Having said this, here´s a list of Facebook characteristics that may be of some help, or as I put it, "Facebook in a nutshell".

1. The Wall is merely a space. It is placed on each user's page allowing friends to post messages for the user to see. One user's wall is visible to anyone with the ability to see their full profile. Many users use their friend's walls for leaving short, temporal notes.
2. One of the most popular applications on Facebook is the Photos application, where users can upload albums of photos, tag friends, and comment on photos. About 60 million photos are added each week. That means 5 terabytes of disk space.
3. A somewhat naive feature in Facebook are gifts. They are displayed in the website's gift shop. Frinds can send "gifts" –which are small icons of novelty items- to each other by selecting one from Facebook's virtual gift shop and adding a message. Gifts given to a user appear on the recipient's wall with the giver's message, unless the giver decided to give the gift privately, in which case the giver's name and message is not displayed to other users. Facebook users are given one free gift to give upon account signup.
4. Facebook includes a "poke" feature which allows one user to send a “nudge" (in the Messenger sense) to another. According to FAQ "a poke is a way to interact with your friends on Facebook" (...) "People interpret the poke in many different ways, and we encourage you to come up with your own meanings." In principle this is intended to attract the attention of the other user. Some users take it as a sexual advance. This interpretation of the feature inspired a popular Facebook group titled "Enough with the Poking, Lets Just Have Sex", which, as of December 2007, has more than 340,000 members.
5. The "status" feature allows users to inform their friends and the Facebook community of their current whereabouts and actions. This very much resembles Twitter functionalities.
6. Facebook events are a way for members to let friends know about upcoming events in their community and to organize social gatherings. Events can be open, closed, or secret. When setting up an event the user can choose to allow friends to upload photos, video, and posted items.
7. The Facebook Platform provides a framework for developers to create applications that interact with core Facebook features. Now there are more than 10,000 applications. Some metrics have changed along the months, as Facebook changed the way in which the popularity of applications is measured, in order to give more attention to the more engaging applications. There is some criticism about the attention some applications received only by growth; in fact they were highly viral, yet useless applications. This effect deserved the name of "cornucopia of uselessness." OK, my judgement is biased...
8. Facebook released an application of its own for sharing videos. Users can add their videos with the service by uploading video, adding video through Facebook Mobile, and using a webcam recording feature.

Since I have some passion for contradiction, I have recently joined the Keira Knightley Atonement Green Dress Appreciation Society Facebook group. Useless? Well... it´s another Facebook application, you see.