Man I love facebook.

Every time a Facebook usage topic comes up there's the usual round of scorn usually backed up by a strange display of plumage involving the sentence, "I just deleted my facebook yesterday/last month/last year/never used it."

And that's okay. But I feel compelled to make the same post in response, and so I want to point out to my fellow HN-ers why I think Facebook is so wonderful. There's also a note about privacy at the bottom[1] since that seems to be a big reason people stay away. I feel as if a lot of people here missed the point and don't understand what the average person sees in this system. I'll try to relay my experience in the hopes that the utility becomes more clear.

To most people, especially a shy person, the usefulness of the site is astronomical.

Among others I am friends with my boss, my mother, my little cousins. Facebook lets shy people like me keep in touch with a massive amount of people where I can write them the modern equivalent of letters very quickly and easily, as well as let them broadcast their life's updates to me. I can keep in touch with all manner of people. I love writing letters, people love getting letters.

Literally, facebook is a modern "An open letter to my friends" system. And it's great at it.

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Without Facebook, I'd have no idea cousin X is having a baby, or that Y is having apartment trouble that I can help them with, or that Z got a new game we can play together, or person A is considering selling their car, and so on. I could find these out on my own, through a series of phone calls that I place daily/weekly/monthly, but its exceedingly hard to do with all relatives, and hard from a motivation perspective if you're shy. Status updates solve that well.

If I meet someone at an event and really hit it off (romantically or professionally or friend-ily), I can go on Facebook the next day and look them up by name and add them. No exchanging phone numbers or emails or anything like that. I just search for them and find them. In college it was enormously useful for making friends and I still find it useful now that I've graduated.

I made a page for my hometown (90K population city in NH). I broadcast events going on around the city (fireworks, beer festival, city meetings). In this way I help my community learn about the goings-on of the town. It's a surprisingly popular page (more popular than the local newspaper's facebook page).

These functions in times past were done with the laborious process of making a million letters or phone calls or in many cases (like my hometown page) scarcely made or not made at all. Facebook is not just a system of open letters, its the new Town Crier.

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Okay that's off my chest.

Sadly as of late its getting a little less great at its function. A lot of the reason for the downturn in usage/usability, sadly, is probably due to the fact that every ad, every sponsored story and sponsored "like" is adding to a signal/noise ratio that will make people frown. It's a shame that Facebook's financial success as the model is right now is directly competing with its utility[2], but oh-well. We may have to sigh a bit more, but its still extremely useful to the casual user and has the usage stats to show it.

[1] I don't think privacy alone is enough to negate the utility of fbook. All of my privacy options are on the lowest possible setting. I treat anything that occurs on the site as if it were public. I don't see why not, I'm not going to pretend that photos of myself or my wall postings are anywhere near interesting enough to hide. In fact I'm not sure why people who put things on facebook want privacy at all. I never worry that something I say might be picked up on by the wrong person because I'd never say anything that I wouldn't want the world to hear.

[2] It may be worth pointing out that I love facebook but would never invest in it for a few reasons, and this is one of them. One could argue Google ads make Google searches more useful. Facebook ads, as they are today, directly impinge on the utility of the platform. But that's a separate topic for another day!