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Comment by m0nastic | Hacker News Reader

I spend a good portion of time logged into Facebook (in Chrome, which I don't use for anything else, and is the only place Flash is installed on my system).

It started with old friends from high school, which was sort of nice, but obviously if I'd have really wanted to keep up with these people, I would have made more of an effort to do so.

But now it's the only way that the majority of my friends communicate. None of them use email anymore, almost none of them have blogs, or websites.

I can totally understand why nerds find Facebook's popularity confounding (as they were already doing all of the things that it facilitates in a more customizable fashion without the lockin of one company), but for every single normal person I know, it's the de-facto way they use the internet.

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I'm surprised and somewhat saddened to hear that most of your friends only communicate through facebook.

In my case, we still mostly contact via phone calls, resorting to text messages for less urgent messages and email for longer and more persistent messages

Most of them were never big on phone calls (which suits me fine, as I absolutely never answer my phone), but would occasionally use text messages for something temporal (like: "Hey, I'm at the bar, where are you guys?").

I never had much luck getting most of them using email. When we all left high school, I made the futile attempt to set up an IRC channel for them to use and spent months talking them through it. This was back in 97, so our other options were limited.

Thankfully, AIM came on the scene, and that became the way that the majority of us stayed in touch.

I have no idea why email never clicked for any of my friends, but it's been true of everyone I've met as an adult. It could just be that they associate email with "work", and therefore never took to the medium.

I'm not, however, saddened by the fact that they've all standardized on Facebook. I'm actually glad that they've all picked one thing and use it. If it'd been something else, that would have been fine too, but Facebook is ridiculously well-suited to everyone I know, so I'm not surprised it's become so popular.

That is exactly the way almost every non-tech/nerd I know uses Facebook. Setting up a website is too much work. And I can understand that for them having to remember several logins and unconnected accounts (one for photo sharing, another for email, yet others for IM, blog etc.) is a lot less attractive than one site that lets them do all of the above (albeit with much less control and privacy, neither of these cause them to lose any sleep).

As for me, since most of my non-tech friends are on facebook anyway I have to keep my presence there to keep in touch. I have to admit, facebook is a pretty effective way of keeping in touch. I know I can call/email or meet in person - which I do for my inner circle of close friends. But the fact of the matter is a lot of my friends live abroad and international calls are expensive. Also, we seldom feel the need to make a call or send an email unless there is something specific we want to talk about (but that could be just me). OTOH, placing a small comment on Facebook seems a lot more effortless. The other party can also not feel compelled to answer. And there are a lot of friends I have on facebook who I don't want to lose contact with but don't want to have a day to day relationship with either (i.e. saying hi or meeting up once in a while - but not hanging out every weekend or constantly IM-ing every day).

Another thing is, apart from facebook chat, all interactions on facebook are semi-live at best. I can post a comment and the reply does not have to instant. This is good, especially if the other party lives in a very different time zone.

I am also on G+, but unfortunately most of my non-tech friends find it rather confusing, empty or just ignore it altogether. Which is a shame because liked it from the start.

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