When it comes to Facebook, the saying that comes to mind is, "The more things change, the more they stay the same." I am speaking, of course, of the newest format from the social media giant. It's confusing, complicated and has me feeling clueless, especially this new "Subscriber" option. I can't really complain, though. Facebook has proven to be a very big marketing tool for NSBNews.net.
That's the part I have most embraced. I have one of the largest, if not the largest individual social network on Facebook in Volusia County with 9,144 contacts and counting. Here is my Facebook breakdown: Henry Frederick: 4,075; NSBNews.net: 3,062; VolusiaNews.net: 1,976; NSB News LLC: 31.
This has allowed me to market NSBNews.net near and far.
But there is a paradox to Facebook that cracks me up: so-called "friends."
I'll be the first to admit that I have no clue who most of my friends are, which is the rub. I have been slapped by Facebook at least a dozen times for either trying to make too many friends at once or unwittingly reaching out to those who have super sensitive restrictions that you don't know about until you click "send request" and zap, you lose your searching for friends privileges for a period of days.
Yet Facebook continues to tempt you with complete strangers under the guise of "people you may know." Don't you think I'm smart enough to just type in the names of people I know and search for them?
A week ago, I was coming off a three-day ban against soliciting friends, when within two minutes of being Facebook's purgatory, I was banned again, this time for seven days. You can't reach a real person on Facebook. All that is offered are stupid phrases that lead you nowhere.
So I did some research on Facebook and found some hypocrisy on its end. Facebook was forced to admit it hired a PR firm to badmouth an even bigger Internet giant, Google.
Facebook wants you to believe it cares about your privacy. Let's be real about this: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Bing, YouTube, et al. are all about making money by selling your private information. Maybe I as a Facebook user can't access some of your personal info, but you can be guaranteed some nameless drone at Facebook can. If you think that your information is under lock and key, then perhaps you need to be locked up.
They put out these stupid games like CityVille (which my wife, Sera, by the way, loves) so that you are forced to seek out pieces from friends to complete your puzzle fun. Then there are all the so-called causes and other gimmicks designed to get you to open up your personal information.
I came up with a phrase for Facebook a couple weeks back: "Big Brother Controlling the System." Here were a few of my rants:
# It's annoying, and quite frankly, unfair, that Facebook put a block on me from seeking out new friends they deem as strangers when they bombard me constantly with "people you may know" strangers around the clock, even the same ones over and over again... Let's face it, Facebook is annoying. It's their way or no way. If you don't check off that you agree, you can't proceed, so what's the point?
# Facebook doesn't want you contacting strangers, but yet it puts strangers out there constantly. Hey Facebook, if there were people we knew, don't you'd think we were smart enough to just search for them? There is no one to appeal to. But Facebook, like everything else in life, will face competition at some point and people will leave in droves. Facebook, your Big Brother behavior is annoying! I'd love to meet you Face to Face, but then again, Facebook is faceless...
# It's annoying, and quite frankly, unfair, that Facebook put a block on me from seeking out new friends they deem as strangers when they bombard me constantly with "people you may know" strangers around the clock, even the same ones over and over again...
# Hey Big Brother, when you give us no appeals or find us guilty until proven innocent, you are violating our rights as Americans. But then again, you represent the corporation side of things, ie, money and profits, which means you have a strong lobby in Congress...
Facebook, however, does afford me my own brand of entertainment. I've actually had hundreds of total strangers seek me out as a "friend you may know" while I was putting out "Henry's Top 100 Songs of the Rock and Roll Era" starting at No. 100 and working my way up to No. 1, just like Kasey Kasem's old American Top 40. I used links from YouTube videos. Early on in the countdown, I even offered a $1,000 reward to anyone who could guess what No. 1 was. I got the usual suspects: "Stairway to Heaven," "Freebird," "Satisfaction," "Hey Jude," etc.
Nobody guessed it.
The top song on my list was "One" by U-2, which I thought was pretty cool for the top spot. I even got a few people riled up when I jokingly made "The Macarena" as No. 1 before I came clean with my real choice.
Currently, I have a new countdown: "Henry's Top 100 songs that you secretly love, but are too embarrassed to admit to others." I have 79 to go with that one before unveiling No. 1.
It's typical for me to post classic rock songs from YouTube during the overnight hours when I'm writing and posting stories for NSBNews.net. I have made friends with people who share my interest in sports such as New York Jets fans.
Facebook has enabled me to reconnect more with former co-workers like my dear friend Steve Lieberman, an investigative reporter with the Journal News of Rockland and Westchester counties in New York where I was a breaking news reporter for eight years before coming to Florida in the mid-1990s.
I've also reconnected with high school and college friends and a famous cousin, retired gymnast Marcia Frederick of New England, who won a gold medal in the uneven parallel bars in 1978 in Strasbourg, France, a tune-up to the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. She was not able to compete because of President Carter's ban with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
My love-hate relationship with Facebook is like the Jim McKay anthem from ABC's Wide World of Sports: "The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat..."