How I Use Facebook

The experience of eating one’s own ice cream* 

There is no denying that I am a Facebook power user. Actually, if there’s another level higher, I’m probably that—a super-power user. How does an employee eat her own ice cream? Let me count the ways:

E-mail lists are dead to me.

Pretty much every e-mail list at work has been replaced by a Facebook group—Social, For Sale, FYI/Announcements, Product X Team, Feedback on Product X, Design Team, Design Managers. Some groups have funny names like FIG Newtons (our design standards group). Other groups have a constantly changing name (which is kind of a trollish thing to do since it makes it very hard to find the group in search or in a list).

Why groups over e-mail lists? Three reasons:

1. Groups are better at discussions. Interested in a particular thread? Comment/subscribe to follow the conversation. Not interested? Go on your merry way. No need to have your inbox flooded with responses every time somebody replies to a post you don’t care about.
2. Groups enable lighterweight participation. If someone posts a novel idea about how to get chinchillas to inhabit Mars and I love the suggestion but have nothing else to add, a like does the trick. I don’t have to type by jove, that’s brilly! Liking is sufficient. And if I want to add, Why chinchillas and not capybaras? the already-expanded comment box with send-on-enter feels like less effort than figuring out whether you want Reply or Reply All and then shooting off a mail message.
3. Groups have simpler notification controls compared to e-mail. Maybe you are a master of e-mail filters and rules, but I’ve declared e-mail bankruptcy on more than a few occasions. With groups, I’ve set it up so that only a few important ones notify/push me about every post so I get them immediately. With less-urgent groups, I turn off the notifications and visit the group whenever it makes sense, usually at the end of the day. This makes it easy to follow and consume a ton of updates with fairly minimal effort.

I prefer Facebook messages over e-mails when I’m talking to someone 1:1 or in a small group.

Even with coworkers, I find myself gravitating towards using Facebook messages rather than composing e-mails. It just feels way more personal and direct, like talking in real life. I can see their profile pic, have a sense of whether they’re around or have seen my message, and liberally sprinkle stickers into our conversation. If I have a question, I get much faster responses with messages than with e-mail, in part due to mobile push and also because the messaging channel affords higher signal and less noise. Pretty much every message in my Facebook inbox is something that ought to be there, from someone I know well and that I’ll definitely respond to.

Graph Search photo queries always bring a smile to my face.

There is a term we use around the office, feedbomb, to describe the act of finding a photo of such indescribable awesomeness that you have no choice but to like, comment and share it such that it will be surfaced in your other friends’ feeds, leading to great collective delight. Last week, I saw the most incredible photo in my feed of my friend Joey. It was in a dramatic, Rembrandt-esque chiaroscuro style, taken seven years ago, when Joey rocked a mane that would make any seventeenth century lord (or Kenny G) jealous. Using graph search for photos tends to uncover a lot of these gems. It’s usually with great fondness that I’ll check out “Photos of me and my friends before 2008,” or “Photos of me and my husband” or “Photos by <name of friend who always carries a camera around>.”

I’m a big fan of “hide all from…”

I have over a thousand friends on Facebook. We’re friends because we all walked a similar path at some point, and because I know their names and faces, and would gladly have a chat if I ran into them on the street. But let’s be honest. I’m not interested in what each and every single one of those thousand-plus people had for breakfast, or is doing Saturday night, or is listening to on their favorite music service. I imagine that they probably feel similarly about me. Which is why when I see stories that aren’t that relevant to me, I open up the actions menu and say “hide all stories from this person.” That way, I can still swing by their profile from time to time to see what’s up, but my feed will only show me posts and photos from the people I want to see on a regular basis.

My favorite group is the one my husband and I made to share random links with each other.

These can be links to pandas playing with pumpkins (“red pandas are def better than raccoons”), stunning discovery of the fact that there is a duck pond in the town we’ve lived in for ten years (“with geese too!”), an amazing article on the evolution of morality (“tl;dr”), or generally strange concepts (“I prefer steaming to ironing… but I suppose there is a certain satisfaction that comes from a well- pressed shirt.”) There’s no urgency to reading these posts—we check our group whenever we have time. It’s asynchronous sharing at its best. There is only one rule: every post that’s seen must be commented on by the other person.