I’ve got to admit, I really love the recent Toyota Venza commercial. It focuses on a young girl who’s worrying about her parent’s lack of social connection. You’ve probably seen it, but if not check it out.
It’s a really funny shot across the bow of the social network generation that thinks “living” is being glued to their laptop networking with virtual “friends,” while their sad and pathetic parents are stuck with lifeless activities like hiking and biking in nature with some flesh-and-blood acquaintances (all courtesy of the beautiful Toyota in their garage, of course).
Now, don’t worry, I’m not bringing this up as another entry point into a grumpy rant about social networking. Seeing that commercial again, though, just reminded me of some Facebook things I’ve seen lately that I thought I’d toss out there for your betterment.
For instance, you may already be using Facebook’s recently released Smart Lists feature which allows you to sort your Close Friends (the people you want to hear from on a regular basis) from your Acquaintances (folks you only want to hear from if they lose a limb or vital organ). Well, now Facebook has introduced a new Subscribe button to give its users even more ways to sort through and categorize all of their many friends.
Up to this point Facebook had limited you to updates from the same 200 or so friends with whom you interact most, casting others into a list of also-rans. With the Subscribe button, you can determine how much or how little you receive from each friend. Do you want to be notified of everything they post, just the normal everyday notifications or simply the big bulletins such as “new baby” or “just adopted a family of dwarfs from Croatia”? Basically it offers us a whole bunch of new ways we can spend our free time and establish better lines of communication with our 1,200 or so friends.
Oh, and speaking of time, the Nielsen research group has been crunching some numbers and came up with an interesting tidbit. It seems that we Americans spend more time on Facebook than any other site on the Web. How much? Well in May of this year, Nielsen calculated that we spent a cumulative total of somewhere around 53 billion minutes on the social meeting site. That breaks down to 100,000 years. Granted, that’s divided into around 150 million users, but still. One-hundred thousand years per month. Now that’s livin’.
Recent Comments