Facebook

A while ago, I promised a “mega rant” about facebook. After some writing, rewriting, and thought, I’ve decided not to write a mega-rant.

I don’t think I’ve been on facebook for any appreciable amount of time in at least a month. It’s just not an effective use of my time. Communication on facebook is less effective than outside (as I’ve already explained). Facebook is a really well-designed system, but it’s not really well-designed to quickly get you to the information you want. Easy example: notification that someone has written on my wall doesn’t contain the actual message from the wall, I’m forced to waste my time to go to the site just to find out that someone wrote “LOL” to me. Replying on facebook only adds to the vicious cycle. It seems like these things are changing with time, but until it does, there are plenty of other things for me to use.

Also, I couldn’t care less about being bit by a zombie.

Anyway, one facebook app I find really useful is Birthday Exporter. It takes all your friends’ birthdays and exports them to Google Calendar, iCal or whatever. With this, I can see all the birthdays in a nice calendar interface that’s already integrated with my schedule. Useful!

Now, if only I could export all my facebook contacts to gmail without getting banned, I’d be set. Hopefully things like this will work cleanly someday..