I like Facebook. I grew up in one state (Florida), went to university in another state (Alabama), and lived large chunks of my adult life in each of two other states (Alaska & Georgia) with shorter stints in two other states (Texas, Idaho) and one foreign country (Russia). Further, all of my extended family (cousins, etc) live in a different area still (New York City & surrounding area, mostly). Facebook helps me maintain contact with all of those people from all of those places. And it's also put me back in touch with some childhood friends and college sorority sisters who I'd lost contact with, during all of my moving around. I use it to post YouTube videos with a few of my local friends (we all enjoy talking music), share scifi geek stuff with a few people from here (mostly people I've known for a while and trust), and monitor my two nephews comings and goings on Facebook for my sister (who is not very internet saavy).
As for the flash games, I actually play one of them. Not for any cool graphics or complex game-play, for sure...that is not even what they are for! I mainly play the one I play to have something to do with a few of my friends from Alaska (they are the ones who asked me to play with them - a small group of them all play together). However, I certainly don't ask anyone else from among my friends to play though (unless they do already when we find each other on FB), let alone 'insist' that they play - that is just silly to even contemplate, as the game is more about the 'fellowship' than the actual game itself, which is kind of silly.
As for the game feeds being annoying, I mean really - you have to be a complete technological idiot to not understand how to hide the feeds from the games. I hide all of those feeds except for the game I play...and I would hope that others know how to do the same, since to do so takes (literally) two clicks of a mouse. Oddly, a few of my local friends also play the game I play...and now some of them have met some of my friends from Alaska as a result of the game. Which is a bit strange...but nice too.
Because of Facebook, I am now in much closer contact with a few of my cousins. One of my cousins (who lives in NY) who I used to see only very rarely, I am now in very regular contact with - we started out doing Facebook, but have now moved on to calling each other about once a month, which has been nice. Another of my cousins who I'd not seen or spoken to in over 20 years, I now see and chat with on FB every day.
One of my childhood girlfriends ended up being a runner, like me...and we talk running.
I even have two ex-boyfriends as friends on Facebook...although they don't know each other and both of them friended me first. One of them has joined in with my local friends on the YouTube video comments, as he was a singer in a Seattle band at one time. So all of these compartmentalized parts of my life are blending together, just a bit, I guess, because of FB.
Bottom line, there are definite pluses. I just keep my privacy settings shut down tight and make liberal use of the little 'lock' feature, which allows you to post certain things only to a select few. And I would never, EVER post anything like my address, phone number, or anything like that. That is just dumb...and anyone who is smart enough to have figured out how to register on TrekBBS ought to be at least smart enough to not post their cell phone number on Facebook.
Seems to all be working for me so far. And if it stops working, I can always deactivate my account.
