I have a friend, a learned, disciplined, composed friend, who nevertheless logs on at the wee hours or at dawn to remove food from ovens in her cafe in the game cafeworld an application offered on facebook. Just as I know other people are masters on other games like Farmville.
There is a certain allure of these games that compel those who play them, intruding into their lives like nothing else I have observed. To extents that you can reach level 62 (surely that must be many hours of game playing). And i have to say i appreciate facebook for offering gaming and entertainment that possible develops real life skills. For example, Farmville introduces some of the skills like forward planning and strategising needed to meet the diverse needs of a functioning farm, without ever having to come close to a cow. While this is hugely attractive from an intellectual perspective, I have to say I never got it from a personal perspective. I mean I struggled to even play snake on mobile phones when this became popular. Maybe it’s a fundamental gene that makes one able to interact with online games, to comprehend them and be able to drive a certain level of satisfaction that they go back time and again. But even i can appreciate that in this area of light possibly educational entertainment, facebook excels.
Following recent announcements, it seems that our host who enticed us to spend our free time on Farmville and the like obviously feel that we do not spend enough time on fb that they have developed new platforms to enable us (thats 38 million of us) to live more of our lives through facebook. Am talking about the integration or addition to fb services to include email @facebook.com in such a way that you do not need to leave facebook to talk, email or text your friends.
To me, this seems like wanting to mix pleasure (as most fb apps are geared towards) with the much more serious business of our lives (as reserved for more stoic communication tools such as email and phone calls). We are waiting to see what this new email service really looks like, am sure some rushed to be the first to have a @facebook address. So without giving it a chance and seeing the uptake numbers, its hard to say more. But with an exceedingly wearisome feeling of having new technology thrust at me before i can cope with the previous version, leaves me decided unexcited at FB recent announcements that they have mixed pleasure with business and come up with email services for everyone in the world, not just the facebook faithfulls with already existing.
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