Confessions of a Facebooker

Having staved off becoming a member of Facebook for a long time, I finally caved and joined last week. 

I had held off commitment until now because social media is like a "time-sucking vice" for me and between running a company, educating an industry about word of mouth, participating and speaking at live networking events, my blog, current social network participation and trying to lead a 1/2 decent life away from the computer, I feared losing even more of my life to the online Gods.

Well it's happened....for all the right reasons, Facebook has become another incredibly sticky diversion in my life.

What broke my reticence to participate?
- Julia Stein constantly hollering at me at each Third Tuesday that its was better than life itself - kudos 
- One of the students I met the other day claimed that Toronto was Facebook's largest hub which explains why I feel like a later adopter than I'm usually accustomed to (and I disdain being a late adopter)
- If a marketer needs to learn about the psychology of today's young consumer and tomorrow's mainstream, they simply have to be here.

In comparison to its other sites, Facebook has already proven its worth. It's considerably more interactive than  Linked In, it's so much cleaner than My Space and provides a number of neat little benefits not found on other sites...I'm particularly fond of the birthday tracker and the trivia questions.

It also has a very interesting audience and its lifecasting orientation geared to learn more than just ankle deep stuff about somebody else, sometimes scarily so. I was about to jump on the Twitter phenomenon and realized why make the commitment when Facebook provides so many more benefits  and depth without the need to being handcuffed to a personal Truman Show.

I also enjoy the fact that the preponderance of people are younger than me on this site ---they're frankly more interesting than most people I come across in my day to day life. Hopefully a few more of the early adopting hipsters born in the '70s and '60s will also get sucked into the Facebook vortex so I can shake the feeling of being the only guy that has Laurier'92 as his graduating year.   

Now if I could only find another 5 hours in the week, I guess I just won't eat. Poke me if you get the chance.