Seventeen Years On Facebook

Introduction

I have been on Facebook for seventeen years, as long as I have been running my blog which you can visit here, and it seems every day that Facebook finds one more way to confound and annoy us. Seven Days In is here if you wish to explore it, although since joining Vocal is has just become a repository for observations on books that I read with the odd extra:

I've included "25 Years" by The Hawklords even though I have only been on Facebook for seventeen years, but no doubt I will still be around in eight years time.

But This Is About My Time On Facebook

Around 2007 my friend Kate sent me an email to join this thing called Facebook and I have been here since then.

In my time on Facebook I have met new friends, lost friends, fallen out with people or rather they have fallen out with me for various reasons but I am still here despite the odd ban.

There have been numerous pseudo alternatives to Facebook which seem to have come and gone (they may still be about) but it seems that Facebook is still the Social Media Hub of choice for most of the world.

I still feel is like a bus service that often deviates from the expected route, breaks down and sometimes drops you in the middle of somewhere that you don't want to be.

One of my problems is that the facilities of Facebook can sometimes work and other times seem to be designed to make you fail. My modus operandi is always to find a way of making it do what I want but I don't always succeed in getting my way.

We are often hit by its seemingly arbitrary censorship while seeing other posters get away with virtual murder.

Sometimes the issues are big and sometimes they are tiny but annoying. There are many times when things behave inconsistently on Facebook and there is no one to ask for the reason that these things happen, so it is up to us to find an acceptable workaround.

Despite the issues we have with Facebook on many fronts, it has many positives, or most people would not stay on here.

It has allowed me to reconnect with old friends as far away as Australia and New Zealand as well my place of origin Preston, and allows me to keep in touch with friends and events on Tyneside and Wearside. I am fairly open on Facebook so often get requests from undesirables but that is the nature of the beast and they are easy to block.

One excellent thing is it reminds me of the birthdays of Facebook friends, and that has often saved embarrassment on my part.

Up til April 2021, Facebook was something that I used sparingly, but then I signed up with Vocal (which is where you are reading this). I then found Vocal Groups where I have made some amazing friends, and my Facebook friend list went up from about three hundred to over five hundred. They and many other Vocal friends who are not on Facebook have helped my writing improve and made me a very successful Vocal Creator.

So the combination of Vocal and Facebook has been amazingly beneficial, and for me, there is no doubt that Facebook and Vocal are far more than the sum of their parts.

Conclusion

I really don't know how much of Facebook works. For this post, I was trying to find when I started on Facebook (which I am sure is available somewhere) but I had to check my friendship with Kate and that started on Facebook in early 2007.

Thank you for reading, and for being a Vocal or Facebook friend or both, I really appreciate your support.