Facebook - friend or foe?

As a long time user of Facebook (having signed up back in the day when a university email was actually required to become a member) I have seen it's developments which have essentially made it become more available to the greater public. What this means is it caters for a greater variety of people - which previous dominating social network 'Myspace' failed to latch onto. Case in point, as part of my 340 or so friends on Facebook, 1 is my mother and 2 are my older and younger brothers.

Whether you're a tween or 40 year old with 3 kids, it seems the Facebook Games phenomenon seems not to discriminate by age. Luckily for me, I abandoned my Farmville long before it became a trend and can now rejoice in not wasting hours of my life waiting for crops to grow.

So what does this all contribute to the real potential of Facebook? I have seen many friends hesitant to join the social network claiming it's a waste of time and that they would prefer just to communicate with one another in the 'real world.' Whilst this is a valid point, I always fail to see what they must understand 'the real world' to mean when we live in times when the internet has essentially blurred the distinctions between reality and the online realm.

A friend once warned me when I suggested I was going to delete my own Facebook that "People who don't have Facebook don't matter in real life, they drop off everyone's radar and everyone forgets them" It made me reflect that we have all become so dependent on forging our community of friends and family online. Though this may be outrageous to some, I don't necessarily see this in it's negative form. I want to show everyone what I'm doing, I want people to know that I am in X location at X time, I want to know exactly how many friends I actually hold in real life and I like knowing that when i join X group, there are 300,000 other people in the world who think like me.

Facebook is a global community of people where I can stumble across the profile of someone in India, Vietnam or Brazil without having met them in person. This aspect of Facebook proved valuable prior to my departure for Austria. The International Office had setup a Facebook group for all incoming students to the Fachhochschule and being the addict I am, i was able to check out the people who were joining me for 6 months.

Another potential of Facebook was back in Sydney, when we are required to do group work, we are able to create our own private 'Facebook group' which allows us to submit content easily for others to see and discuss our design ideas via a login we all already had.

Professionally, I use Facebook as a tool to market the company that I work for, reaching out to consumers who would not have heard of the business otherwise. I source the friends via groups that are similar to what my business caters for - allowing us to tap directly into consumers within particular categories - a very valuable tool for businesses who otherwise would be unable to target directly to their demographics.