Facebook as a tool or timewaster

The internet is a great time-waster. Facebook even more so.

Ostensibly a networking site, its best value is as another tool to allow people to keep in touch with each other despite the inevitable tyrannies of time and distance. While snail mail can be personal, mobile phone direct and email easy, Facebook is a permanent placeholder that can be as low maintenance as desired, or generate a constant stream of traffic between people or groups. Yet the bottom line is that one can easily check up on what a friend is up to - without necessarily having to engage. And you never have to lose contact. In fact, solely through Facebook, I've restored a number of contacts I thought were lost for good.

But you get all types. Facebook is also good for communicating interests. But some people almost live on that site, sending/receiving a steady stream of actionable items - questionnaires, games to play, and groups to join (thanks, Andrew, for all the worthy causes - and they are all good, especially the group declaring Steve Fielding to be not real - but there's only so much time in the day...)

I also get a number of friend-linking requests from people I don't know - largely friends of friends, I guess, with a smattering of mistaken identities. I ignore anyone I don't know well. It keeps the names down to a manageable number. Not like some who collect names with little discrimination, and get lost in the morass.

Recently I saw a (Wiley) cartoon - quite funny, but sobering - that typifies for me that rush of blood to the head that accompanies Facebook, and the lack of discrimination that dilutes its use as a tool.


LinkedIn is the equivalent for professional communication. The equivalent collector there is the professional recruiter - many are casting wide their search for names with apparently little planning on how to use LinkedIn as an effective business tool. I accepted a few invitations to link before I realised I was going to get swamped. So with due respect to recruiters (as a contractor, I'm constantly looking for work), I no longer accept invitations from them.

On the nature of errors

Tom's presentation today was on the interface between Sharepoint Services and SQL Server, on which he's very knowledgeable.

But it gave me a couple of double-takes. They were a couple of harmless errors that gave me food for thought.

The first is on the nature of errors. At one point, a slide mentioned 'hit fixes' instead of 'hot fixes'. For someone proofreading a lengthy presentation, not least the one writing it - who can so easily skim through it in an identical manner in which he wrote it - it's very hard to spot word substitutions that may make plausible sense in context. Particularly with technical communication, you'd pretty well have to engage with the whole of the message to spot the error. Nobody else in the audience mentioned it, and I may have just happened upon it.

Another slide had a diagram of three cogs in a triangle, with connectivity between all three, and (opposing) directions of motion indicated for two of them. But this would simply not work in actuality, since the third cog would be subject to contradictory forces. Tom said to me later he was trying to convey the idea of the three factors in combination, but he thought it could equally illustrate the contention between each of the three factors - some of that contention came out in general discussion. I suggested that was a more engaging narrative anyway - that the illustration could be a direct prompt for such a discussion.

But at least he can fix the 'hit fixes' - now that it's been noticed.