Last year, my husband fell head over heels in love with Facebook (a social networking site) and tried to evangelize everyone else to join in as well. The year before that, he was obssessed with Twitter, a microblogging site. I banned him from repeating twitter every five minutes around the house, unless he wanted to sleep on the couch forever and told him I was not interested in joinning Facebook. "I am not antisocial," I would say. "I am just anti-social networks." And we left it at that. You see, my husband, Robert Scoble has been a technical evangelist and is an early adapter of any new software program and shiny gadget he happens to come by any given day of the week. He thrives on stuff like this. I usually let him get over his frantic lust of the new program and gadgets and if he hasn't forgotten about them in a year or two, maybe I give it a try. By that time, they've fixed most of the bugs. I started blogging four years after he did. You catch my drift.

 

So a year or so had passed and Robert was still happily using Facebook and Twitter but I still wasn't convinced. Twitter for example, didn't make sense to me. Why would I want to blog in 140 characters or less if I could blog as long or as short as I wanted to? Then I attended a blogging conference and realized that most everyone else in the room was in a conversation I had no part in. Everyone was on twitter, discussing the conference topics, rating the speakers, planning events after the conference and I had no idea what was going on. I joined twitter that day. As an event planner or attendee, using twitter to monitor the background conversation to evaluate the conference and connect with others is invaluable. I find that I get on twitter while I am at a conference and want to connect to a larger virtual community or while I am watching an event on TV, and want to share my experiences with other online and have immediate feedback. I love twitter now. Robert can say twitter as many times a day as he wants :)

 

As for Facebook, there was nothing Robert could say or do that could convince me to join a social networking site. Why would I want to join a network when anyone could google me and find me if they wanted to and I could do the same. I didn't need Facebook. I had a blog and I had the Internets! As much as I believe in the power of the Internets though, I had been completely unsuccessful to find my best friend from Junior High in Iran. I had been searching for her for twenty two years and I had nothing. I had found some information, but when reaching out it had proven a failure. Finally another friend suggested I search for her on facebook. I laughed outloud. No way! And so she logged in and we found her on Facebook. I joined Facebook that day. I have been using Facebook to find long lost friends all over the world and enjoy relating my experiences to my 300 closest friends from time to time. I love reading status updates on my iPhone. Oh, I am a believer!

 

Robert's newest found love is Friendfeed though, which seems to conglamorte many online services on the same interface. I have tried to join in, but I just don't get it yet. Maybe I need another couple of years. What can I say? I am slow.