2.0
Yeah, yeah, I’ve got a Flickr account, and Googlepages, and a blog, and a Twitter profile, and, now, a Facebook entry, but to be honest, most of this stuff is just junk, a waste of ones and zeroes. Fickr’s o.k., if you want to sign up for a “professional” account and store all your photos online, but I hit the limit and haven’t had much cause to upgrade; I get more value out of Moo calling cards, but don’t want any calendars, stickers, or prints, and have no use for U.S. postage made from my photos. Twitter was fun for all of five minutes, but frankly, I’m not that busy, or too busy to be sending up 140-character updates with any frequency. And Googlepages offers little more than the kind of static “homepage” people were playing with back in the 1980’s, although I can see some measure of utility in setting up a “portal” to my various other Web 2.0 efforts.

There was so much fuss over Facebook lately, however, that I had to have a go, and now that I have, I can see it affords a level of interactivity that other applications don’t, but it’s all self-promotion, really, like piling up “adds” on MySpace. And the applications don’t work nearly as well as would make them of any substantial utility. I thought, for example, that the Visual Bookshelf feature would allow me to catalog my books, but there’s no organizational capability, and the “recommendations” feature keeps offering me books I’ve already added. Amazon must have that technology locked up.

I’ve heard that Facebook is being used or developed towards a more professional networking site, but the limits imposed so far prevent anything substantial being done. You’ve got to be a member of a group in order to join a group, unless it’s an open group, like “Australia”. Great. That’s helping.

Still, it’s keep up or fade into the Luddite past. Maybe I ought to get an iPhone. When they reach Australia next year.