Alone and Unobserved

I’ve spent a lot of the last few weeks being bored. Stress, illness and anxiety have combined to create a particular kind of wild-eyed, insomniac haze that leaves me too tired to do anything useful or engaging, but too wired and jumpy to sleep. When I’m in that state, what’s left to do but surf the web?

Unfortunately, I can only wander aimlessly across the interweb for a short while before even that palls. I have several blogs I read regularly (see sidebar), a couple of forums I post on, and a few webcomics I follow, but blogs and webcomics only update every so often, and forums (though updated almost constantly) only have so much intelligent material on them. So after about an hour I’m down to the two main “networking” sites I belong to, Facebook and MySpace.

So let’s talk strengths and weaknesses. When you’re strung-out and wide-awake at 2 o’clock in the morning, which should you turn to—MySpace or Facebook?

MySpace specializes in weaknesses: a laughable and bug-riddled interface is “jazzed up” by individual users with psychedelic colors, blaring music and annoying video. Facebook, on the other hand, has a clean, intuitive and uncluttered design. MySpace=fun. Facebook=functional.

A few months ago, the Facebook community was rocked to its core when a new feature debuted: the so-called “News Feed” that keeps you informed about what your friends have been doing lately, with one-line snippets like, “James and Julie are now friends” or “Bob edited Quotes and Music in his profile.” Many people cried police state (even though users can easily change their privacy settings to prevent any or all of these announcements), but I say, that’s exactly what I’m looking for. MySpace informs you when your friends are online, and when they last logged on, but it doesn’t say whether they’ve changed anything, which means you have to go into Bob’s profile and read through it line by line to see if anything’s changed—and that’s if the color scheme he has selected leaves anything readable. On Facebook, on the other hand, it’s all there:

Today


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• Bob is feeling poorly. 10:01 pm
  

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• Bob changed his about me to “I’m fantastic and ur not.” 9:40 pm
  

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• Bob drank an entire bottle of Glenlivet on a dare. 9:32 pm
  

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• Bob wrote on James’s wall. 9:00 pm
  

  I so will! Just you watch!

  See Wall-to-Wall
  

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• James wrote on Bob’s wall. 8:49 pm
  

  Nuh-uh!

  See Wall-to-Wall
  

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And right away, thanks to Facebook, you know you need to get some new friends.