Saving Face: Keeping your sanity on Facebook

Is Facebook the greatest thing to come down the pike? Or is it a colossal time-waster and a potential security threat?

It could be both.

More people are setting up personal accounts and using features like groups or pages to promote their business, non-profit, or hobby.

Facebook is a "social networking" site, meaning that it allows you to communicate with a designated network of friends. Because of the way it's set up, once you've entered information such as the high school or college you attended, you'll discover old classmates -- or they will discover you.

Facebook's "status updates" work a lot like Twitter messages -- some people have their systems set up so that whenever they publish a message to Twitter it also gets posted to Facebook, or vice versa. But Facebook has a lot of other features, including a wide variety of third party applications, games and widgets. When you go to your Facebook page, you may find various requests from your friends: "Sally Smith wants to send you a piece of flair!" "Joe Jones has challenged you to a game of Wordscraper!"

In many cases, accepting your friend's playful greeting or "gift" requires installing the particular Facebook application related to it.

Facebook can be a lot of fun -- but not everyone has to use or enjoy it the same way. If you were to accept every request or install every application, Facebook could become a huge time-waster and lose some of its usefulness. I believe part of the secret to Facebook is figuring out when to say "no." You have to figure out what your comfort level is and how much time you want to spend.

I play a few games on Facebook. I almost always have an active game of the Scrabble-like Wordscraper going with an old college roommate of mine from Georgia; I make a move when I get around to it, and he does the same, so a game can take days to complete. I'm also involved in a multi-player game called "Mafia Wars" and another one called "Kidnap!"

I have set up Facebook groups or pages for the Times-Gazette, for my self-published novel, and for the group with which I take my short-term mission trips, and I check on those quite frequently to see if new people have joined or new content has been posted.

But I have to admit, I simply click "ignore" for most of the little Facebook piece-of-flair or mini-application requests I get from friends. I got tired of having to install a new application every time I received one. I also heard one expert caution against disclosing your birth date on Facebook for identity theft reasons, so I removed mine, and that means I'm constantly having to ignore requests for people to add me to a popular "birthday calendar" application.

I also, because of my job, avoid the requests to join petition-like groups ("10,000 people who think [politician] is right," or "Facebook users opposed to [name of bill]," or what have you).

At first, I thought that some people might get upset at this, but if that has happened I've never gotten wind of it. I don't think most of my Facebook friends follow up enough to see exactly who has accepted which request.

The point is, you need to be able to set limits about how best to enjoy Facebook. If you enjoy all the applications and activities, great! Have a ball. But if you don't, don't give up on Facebook altogether. Just pick and choose how you want to participate. There's a middle ground between signing off altogether and having so many applications and friends and activities that your Facebook page becomes a blur and starts to lose its usefulness.

-- John I. Carney is city editor of the Times-Gazette and covers county government. He is also the author of the self-published novel "Soapstone." His personal web site is lakeneuron.com.