facebook -the new playground

A software professional with 12+ years under my belt, I have been fighting for a while the urge to join the so-called social networks.  Not that I am not curious.  But like many, I believe, I am having problems keeping up with what I already have.  No sooner that I received an invitation to start blogging on wordpress, that I received scores of invitations from my contacts to join Friendster.  After weeks, err..months of indecision, I finally made it to Friendster, only to be told by one of my contacts, and former Canisius College classmates, Andreas Suwito, to also consider using Facebook.

Of course, my immediate reaction would be, thank you very much.  I am happy with my Multiply, WordPress, and now Friendster accounts.  Of course, we Indonesians are big in terms of politeness, and not want to offend Andre, I told him that I would consider Facebook as soon as I have the time.  With one full time job, another part time, and raising a young family where my close relatives are 12,000 miles away, “free” time is indeed a tricky concept.   It is almost like what everyone heard in the press nowadays: “the so-called Wall Street talents” -an oxymoron, something that should or could never get together in the first place.  If there is ever any talents that Wall Street ever has, it is only good for those in Wall Street, but definitely not for us in the Main Street.

Well…pardon me to digress a bit.  It seems that my American dreams, like so many of others, suffers pretty serious blow when the Dow Jones retreats all the way to 8000.  If that is not bad news, some technical analysts who correctly predicts the “bear market” may even suggest that we are not seeing the bottom yet.  Now, whatever happen  to the good old adage that “if you work hard, save enough, do good deeds, and everything else should turn out to be all right”.   Well, I propose a slight revision to that old adage: “Make sure that your savings, and investments are not complex derivatives disguised and sold as safe investment products”.  Because that was exactly people from all walk of life found out the day Bear Stearns collapsed.  Many lost their savings and even worse their life savings as far as Hong Kong and Singapore.  In Singapore alone, it was estimated that the Bear Stearns carnage reached all the way to more than half-of-Billion US dollars.

So watching the economy like a hawk nowadays, I finally revisit this great idea that was one of the oft-cited principle during my McIntire Management of Technology class, that of “delegation”.  For months, my better half has inundated me with lots of “computer/technical” related questions ever since I acquired the once state-of-the-art Gateway laptop.  For a long while, I was the primary user of the laptop.  That was the case until I made a “strategic mistake” of having broadband connection at home.

With the help of broadband and thanks to Google, she perfected her “Kue Putu” recipes, a well known traditional Indonesian sweets.   She has made some “Morning Glory” muffins that make it hard for me to lose a few pounds more off my weights.   And if that is not enough, she is able to make some amazing “Fried Rice” that taste just like what we have from a well-known Thai restaurant here in town, voted as the No. 1 Asian Restaurant for a few years in a row.

Seeing the all of those wonderful progresses that she has made, I found myself a perfect and eager “equal” in terms of the vast possibilities of the Web.   I asked her to open and try out facebook.com.  Of course, like everything else, she uses it pretty modestly in the beginnings.  Her profile was missing a picture.  There were no albums.  And she had only a handful of friends in her networks.

Seeing her struggles at times I almost discounted facebook completely.  What is good about all of these social networks anyway?  OK, you can post personal pictures, and invite your friends, and post your thoughts or make comments.  It is just like glorified email account right?!  Well, that was my brutal and cynic views until I saw my wife re-connects with her High-school, Junior and Senior, classmates.  Starting with inner circle of her close friends, in Indonesia and the US, she finds  herself  connected with growing number of classmates.  Almost everyday, someone would post comments on her wall or requests to be confirmed as a friend.

Soon, my wife spends more time communicating and “conversing” with her friends through Facebook, eclipsing the other alternatives such as the IM  through the Yahoo messenger.  Facebook will be the thing that she would check several times during the day, even in the evening.  I see the transformation on her part from being so hands-off to a brazen explorer in the online world.  The computer or the laptop does not remind her of those boring days when she had to take Basic programming in her undergrad class.  She would not remember important Computer Science concepts such as memory  or local and global variable are.

Now, she is quite delighted when someone “tags” her in the pictures or vice versa from the days long gone.  This time she actually is, dare I say, having fun.   Now, call it  spouse jealousy or rivalry, for lack of better terms,  a computer engineer by training, I cannot let my wife having so much fun by herself.   I do not even wait until my wife sends me an invitation.  I open my own account albeit about a couple of months behind.

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