Do something useful with my facebook account

ok, I’m checking this off as done. I now use facebook to keep in touch with my parents, and to keep an eye on my kids. I also use it to keep up with what my literary friends are reading and writing.

All good. Good enough.

Well, at least I’m doing something with it. And maybe it really is useful.

I’ve reconnected with a dozen or so people I had lost all contact with. Sure, we’re not buddies quite yet, but it’s really fun to catch up with people after a decade or two or even three, and see what they’re doing with their own “wild and precious lives”.

I’ve been poking and being poked on facebook for a while now, but it continues to elude me as anything of merit.

But today I loaded Knighthood, became a Knight, and have been having fun building my castle, city, walls, and so on. Fun, and distracting, but not very useful.

Still, perhaps with the Knighthood application drawing me to look at my facebook page from time to time, I might just start writing on walls and sending superlatives to long lost friends…

I just don’t get it.

It seems to me that Facebook is a complete waste of time, but perhaps I’m just not trying hard enough. Sure, it’s fun at first to connect with all the people I haven’t seen in 20 years, but let’s face it, the reason I haven’t kept in touch with most of them is that I have nothing in common with them. Other than an occasional chuckle from a photo of an overweight, stressed out 40-something whom I haven’t seen since they were an anorexic, uptight 20-something, there isn’t much value there to extract, at least for me.

Contrast that with 43T. Here, I have a dozen or two people I correspond with because of common interests or attitudes about life. Sure, they’re total strangers, but I feel more in common with, say, someone curious about political systems and structures than someone who happened to graduate from the same high school as me.

Anyway, I’ll give it another couple of weeks, but I’m starting to see Facebook as a lost cause for me, and nothing but an endless time sink with very little return.