If you use Facebook, take a step back for minute and really contemplate this: what use is it for you, in a productivity sense? I mean, really? Though most people read blogs, they rarely ever respond. But if you're willing to comment... and you actually are able to find a genuinely useful and productive way to use Facebook I'd really like to head about it. (It seems the serious "productivity" service is Linked-In, not Facebook).

Indulge me if you will...

For "shits and giggles" last year I did what a lot of other Second Life users are doing: create a Facebook account under your Second Life account name; A.K.A: you In-world avatar name. The first "failure" of Facebook is in how they absolutely insist that only real names of real people be allowed to create accounts at all. However, this creates a conundrum. The same conundrum Linden Lab has: enforce your terms of service with regard to account creation, or allow people to bend the rules so you can boast the number of users you have?

For Linden Lab and Second Life: you are allowed to create up to five (5) accounts, full stop. However, I hear word of people who have tens even hundreds of "alt" accounts. And of course it also creates the "bot" problem, which I won;t bother rehashing now. The issue though is that all these alternate accounts are included in the "number of users" Linden lab can proclaim; even "active" user numbers as "active" means any account that has been used at least once in the last 90-days. Bots are really good for those "concurrency" numbers.

As for Facebook, though they have previously enforced their terms of "real person, real name" and killed some high-profile accounts, they don;t actively hunt these bogus people down. The "number of users" result is just way too tempting. They recently have claim 500-million "users". Though I suspect at least half of those are users like me: I don't use Facebook. At all. it's a ridiculous waste of time and a complete joke.

I now have 85 friends. 85! Every single one of them is another Second Life user and almost all of them are in Facebook under their avatar account names. Here's the kicker: I *vaguely* know one, *just one* of all those people. Every. Single. Person. Except that one are 100% total strangers to me. Not a single one of them have ever attempted to so much as IM me in-world with a simply "Hello!". What a fekking joke.

To these people, and likely 75% of every other Facebook account holder, the goal is to boost that number of "friends" as high as possible. Then there's those stupid, idiotic "games" like Farmville and Mafia Mob or whatever the hell it's called. I mean, really?! Here's the irritating part of it, though: these 85 "dunno who you are, but let's call us *friends*" play these stupid games and then select me to participate. This of course messages me inviting me to "install" the "app" so I can waste my time just like all the other losers.

I had to turn off email notifications from Facebook a long time ago. Now I get a message from Facebook once every month or two telling me there are messages waiting for my attention. So I log-in, and click "ignore", "ignore", "ignore", "ignore", "igno..." you get the idea. Fact: facebook is becoming is horribly bad to "legitimate" people as "MySpace" dot com. it is turning into an adolescent playground except at least this time you don;t have viruses, trojans and disgustingly-loud music blaring in your face when you inadvertently visit someone elses profile or "wall".

It's known fact the the grown-up use Kinked-In as their genuine, go-to "circle of contacts service.

So, Linden Lab is hoping to incorporate more "social" features into Second Life, undoubtedly to include Facebook and Twitter. But I wonder if they ever will go the route of the "serious" with services like Lnked-In? Because let's face it: Plurk is a waste of time (sorry, folks: you just aren't *that* interesting in terms of following your "adventures" on a minute-by-minute timeline); Facebook has turned into a typical adolescent playground, admittedly not yet the cesspool MySpace had become.

Though Twitter actually is useful as long as you can find the ones worth following and communicating with. And at worst: the crap-garbage that comes through at least are only force-fed in short, 140-character burps. Easy enough to quickly determine the "followability" of someone there.