Social Networking: Twitbook or Faceter

So here I am, old as buggery but pretty pleased with my PKB (personal knowledge base) on things IT-related. “Chic,” my dearly departed husband taught me almost everything I know. The qualifying adverb is there because he taught it to me a fairly long time ago, when all the trees and leaves were green and the red bird sang.

I have, since losing him, had a string of IT support guys. One OK, one liar and thief, one quite good, and one simply marvellous. This last is not only the totally full bottle on everything I could ever need to know about PCs, but he’s honest, clever, quick, and gives me a special rate. AND he’s really nice! He never craps on me when I call him in urgently because nothing’s working and it turns out that when I cut the kill switch in the morning, I pressed the wrong button. Or when I can’t make the printer print, and he walks in and it prints instantly with a lovely smooth noise. No, he just laughs, and refuses to let me pay for his time in wending his way into this little suburb that’s so unaccommodating to anyone trying to park.

All that kind of embarrassing stupidity aside, I really can manage well on these two PCs. One is on WinXP, so that I can run my web-building and image-editing softwares (both roughly my age), and the main PC runs Win7. Love Win7, and it’s completely easy and pain-free to swap between the two Operating Systems.

Mind you, when my oldest friends gave me a laptop for my Major Birthday last July, I had after a while to give it back to my IT Support (he’d bought it as they’re down in Victoria and I’m in Sydney), because I couldn’t manage the bloody touchpad. I mean, I REALLY couldn’t manage it. However, worse by far than the touchpad problem was Win8. Jesus. What complete moron came up with Win8 as an O/S? I refuse to say ‘designed’, for madmen don’t/can’t actually design, and Win8 most certainly originated in the mind of some people who shouldn’t have been certified. Honestly! – has any of you used it? Do you like it? Or do you, like me, detest it with a deep and undying hatred …? I even installed one of those little software thinggies that’s meant to mask the idiotic desktop full of squares of different colours, and it worked. Well, as much as it was meant to, which wasn’t nearly enough for me.

Anyway: the one thing I can’t bring myself to ask him about is the dreaded social networking pair of Twitbook and Faceter. Should I? Could I? Are they truly necessary to someone trying to make her way with a blogsite to promote her work? Can’t the site be considered sufficient? How does she decide what to put on Faceter and what on the blog? Why should she sign up for Twitbook and tell the world, boringly and repetitively (not to mention inside 140 characters) how terrific her book is? How does she get people to follow her? But at the heart of it all is how does she get to read even a fraction of all the teeny messages pouring past from the people she’s following?

I suspect I’m going to have to bite the bullet and get him to sit down and talk to me about it all. Like I said, he’s clever, and he’ll know if either of them is likely to be of the slightest use to me in my quest to become famous. PARDON? I think my brain just broke. 🙁 I don’t want to become famous (not that it would ever, ever happen)! I just want to get my book in front of more people, so that they can read about the extraordinarily fortunate life I shared with Chic.

In my heart I know that Chic would detest Twitbook and Faceter about as much as I detest Win8, which makes it virtually impossible for me to approach either with integrity. A bloke who runs a blogsite called “The Passive Voice” reckons: “Rarely if ever since Gutenberg has anyone ever wanted to read a book because the author said he or she should read it. Most of us have also never been interested in reading a book just because the publisher told us to read it. Social media do not alter that reality at all.”

Someone called asraidevin replied (amongst dozens of Comments): “Social media isn’t advertising. It’s about being social, making friends. It can suck the life out of you if you view it as a means to an end.”

Hmm. That seems to wrap it up!  What do you think… Are Facebook and Twitter really necessary to our generation?  Do you use and love them, or fail in understanding their power?