"Fred" wrote

I have the exact same opinion
With all the groups fishing, music, photo
There isn't much happening



FB seems, to me, to be a decent way to have a type of small talk chatter
with already known "acquaintances."

My real friends and I exchange phone calls and private e-mails to keep in
touch, and FB seems much too public for serious, personal, interaction.

On the other hand, traditional 'boards' are it appears a better way to meet
"acquaintances" that might, eventually, become real friends. One can get
to know others over time by their posts, without any 'friending,' and
although that most often leads to the conclusion that you'd like to avoid a
given poster, it can, rarely, endear one also G and possibly lead to
something less cyber in the way of "friendship" ( I'm hesitant to even use
that word for cyber acquaintances ). That isn't something I can see as
possible on FB, yet. There you get access to the small talk of others you
have already "met" and a difficult, inefficient interface, at best, to
anything else.

I had hoped the groups would be more accessible ... or rather, that they
would be like 'boards' with the content streamed to all members 'walls'

As it is, it seems to be a major pain to navigate to a group and find out
that nothing new has been posted, or to post something and wait the weeks
until someone decides to reply to it. There are a couple traditional 'Net
based forums I sometimes check that have regular posters I'd like to meet,
people that fish where I do, but even there the interfaces are clumsy and
the download time too long ( especially since everyone posts pictures
instead of links to pictures ).

FB, with it's PHP/ database 'backroom' and it's constant ads adding overhead
to that clumsyness is numbingly slow .... for what you end up getting for
the time spent, .... ah, imho.


I would like to increase my base of real friends, especially friends that
fish the same waters I do and share my passion for that. But, I've more
or less reached the conclusion that goal is best reached by stopping to chat
with real faces in real places ... and the cyber world is mainly an 'off
season' substitute for human interaction.


Larry L ( who now expects others to flock forward and tell stories of loving
'camaraderie' (sp) in the ROFFian past ;- )