but what is it?

Facebook's a funny thing, isn't it? In five years it's gained 600 million users, been involved in several court cases, become the subject of an Academy Award nominated movie, and filled many a page of the Daily Mail. I have a facebook account, most people I know do - not many of them use it very often, but they have one. But it's an odd thing, isn't it.

Take today for example. I have a little over a hundred Facebook friends. In the past hour three of them have updated their status message - and each showed up in my news feed - look at all this jargon! I'm down with Zuckerburgspeak!
This is what my friends had to say on Facebook today.

1. Stop calling Bisto "proper gravy". It's not.

2. woo woo! going to the pub. It's FRIIDAY!!! (sic)

3. i am one of the proudest Egyptians that are filling every inch of Cairo & all of Egypt right now celebrating their freedom for the first time! I love you all and i thank everyone that believed in the revolution and supported me throughout my life.

So based on those what would you suggest Facebook is for? Observational comment? Long winded ways of saying TFIFriday? Orchestrating political revolutions? I really want to know.

Because it better be something worthwhile. From what I see it, and twitter, and the rest, have stiffled creativity more than created it. For every piece of original thinking there are three hundred inanities. And any piece of original thinking is quickly copied and pasted so copiously that it soon loses all sense of originality. For every reuniting of lost friends there are thirty other friends sitting neglected in some list on the left hand side of your screen. For every meaningful connection there is a flurry of one click pokes - what do they mean?

Recently I was seeing someone I didn't know a huge amount about. Facebook became a handy stalking device to find out a bit of background knowledge on her - see if we had any mutual friends, see if any of our friends had mutual friends. I would have felt worse about it if I didn't know she was doing exactly the same thing on me. It was useful. It was handy. It took all the joy out of learning about each other in an organic (slow) manner.

People with something to say used to develop it in blogs all those, oh two, three, years ago. I used to read amazing opinions and conversations and expositions over the course of a five or six paragraph essay, followed by pertinent and sometimes conflicting comments from interested readers. Now we are so busy squeezing it into single paragraphs (or Twitter's 140 characters) that we've lost something very important. "But it's a skill - being concise." Yes it is - but it's a skill not many people have apparently. And it's also a skill being complete - and I miss those days. I want to get in contact with all those bloggers I respected so much who have since disappeared. I want to get them to come back. I want to read their thoughts - not their thoughts condensed into a "what are you thinking" paragraph.

As I started using Facebook I know I started to lose the attention needed to write blogs. My entries became less and less frequent to the point where I was writing one every few months. Does that make me a hypocrite - perhaps. But I blame Facebook for it.

So. What was my Facebook status update today? On this world changing day that will go down in Egypt's history forever? How did I sum up all that was important to me?

I just made my first authentic tagine - in an authentic tagine. And it wasn't poisonous. In fact it was really good. Now just need ten or fifteen people for the leftovers - may have got the quantities a bit wrong.

The people of North Africa will be so proud of me.