i still dont use facebook that much.
1. I reached a critical mass of friends where every time I was on I could click on "Chat" and see a few friends on.
2. I started chatting with a Facebook "poweruser"[1] who said she was going to "teach me how to be cool" by using Facebook better.
3. Partly thanks to (2), I started updating my status a few times a week, whenever I had something interesting[3] to share.
4. People started commenting on and "Like"ing my status updates.
5. I realized that it was pretty cool to be able to connect meaningfully[4] with people in a way that I couldn't before.
I love creating and building things, but social interaction with people I enjoy is just as important to me. Facebook is an invaluable tool in that interaction, just as a great IDE is an invaluable tool in programming. Just like an IDE, Facebook is most valuable when you are using it to its full potential. If you don't have a large number of Facebook friends and you don't use Chat and status updates, it's easy to miss the point. Perhaps you've experienced the difficulty in explaining the benefits of emacs or vi to an Eclipse or VisualStudio user?
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[1] I was at a Taco Bell one night after my friends and I left the bar, and somehow we started talking to a girl and her friends. I walked them home, she got my name, she added me as a Facebook friend, and now we chat on Facebook a few times a month. If not for Facebook, I probably would have never seen her again. That is what makes Facebook relevant, the ability to create new (and keep old[2]) connections that weren't even possible before Facebook got huge.
[2] Just tonight I was talking to a friend on Facebook when another girl said hello to me, a girl that I was good friends with a couple summers ago but haven't seen or talked to much since. Now we're probably going to meet up tomorrow night to catch up over drinks.
[3] For certain values of "interesting"
[4] With Facebook-as-it-is-now, it is possible to tell people that you are barely friends with, "I appreciate you and I'm glad to be friends with you," simply by Liking or commenting on a photo, status update, or shared link. It was hard to do that in the past without being drunk or creepy.
It doesn't stop you using other services/sites/etc -- you just don't need or want to.
Every time I hear this meme repeated, I get the (depressing) image of roughly 400,000,000 stub accounts that were created to check out FB, and promptly abandoned to gather dust.
That's okay. If a popular product doesn't add value for me personally, then I shouldn't use it.
The once-in-a-while that I do use it, I can't figure it out. Are there two or three home pages? It's impossible to find anything. Maybe I just don't spend enough time there. <insert #geezertag here>