Is Facebook a Waste of Time?
Posted by Nick O'Neill on September 19th, 2007 10:02 AMJeffery Zeldman seems to think so. He thinks that Facebook is just another way for blowing “off work you should be doing.” I think he may be partially right. I have spent so much time in the past week playing addictive games on Facebook, that productivity has decreased significantly. I have been working long hours but much of that is due to the fact that so many hours have been wasted on Facebook.
While Facebook is probably the best social network for maintaining relationships, I am starting to see a value behind a site like LinkedIn. Holding true to the KISS model (keep it simple stupid), LinkedIn provides me with little distraction items. On the other hand, I log in to Facebook and am immediately sucked in by my hundreds of friends who are constantly updating their profiles. Then to get a break from my quick update on friendly news, I click on one of the games that I have installed on my account.
What’s funny though is that most of the time people seem to be spending on Facebook (let alone the internet) are on tools that allow them to waste time. Perhaps this is why Facebook will continue to be successful. Are you spending most of your time on Facebook on addictive games or are you actually being productive?
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If you're easily sucked into the addictiveness of social interactivity, then companies are doing the right thing by at least policing the user behaviour and access.
Smart companies know how to make Facebook and the likes work for them.
However, purely business oriented, Linked-In is tops.
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I take a few proactive steps in managing my Facebook account that serve the dual role of reducing wasted time and presenting a clean and desirable "online identity":
~Only join FB groups that offer some professional or constructive utility, or that have a sentimental value. This keeps me away from "If 1,000,000 people join this groups" and helps me stay focused on my life, my work, and my friends.
~Avoid games and "glamor" third party apps. Facebook is distracting enough as it is. Games may be a fun diversion, but they distract from the real purpose of the site, which is to help you cultivate and nurture meaningful connections. The same goes for the "glamor" apps; why spend time decorating my profile or rating my friends when I can actually have real conversations with them about their photos, upcoming events... in a word, their lives.
~Steer serious message traffic to my email. This one is pretty simple; if you have to hop on Facebook to deal with serious productive email, you probably are going to be diverted by the latest Free Gift you've been sent.
Everything said, yeah, I waste time on Facebook. But, at the very least, I try to make that "wasted time" productive in the sense that it focuses on people I care about, both personally and professionally. There is more value in that than you may realize.
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