I suppose it’s time to stop bitching about Facebook; it doesn’t show signs of going away any time soon and, I have to admit, I’m beginning to find it useful.

Before you think I’m jumping too enthusiastically on the technology bandwagon, let me assure you I still eschew e-books and think Twitter is a waste of bandwidth. Twitter offers only a tiny part of Facebook’s most used and useful feature, but without any of the bells and whistles. It is a redundancy. It should slink away. Now.

But Facebook, despite still being beyond my understanding, is carving out a cozy corner in my heretofore cold heart. It is actually a time saver, allowing me to hit one page and find out what all my virtual acquaintances are up to in one go. That, to me, is the selling point, and why it is the page I usually hit after my Yahoo mail homepage. It doesn’t take as much time or effort as reading though blog after blog and it lets me catch up on everyone. That said, it is a lot more superficial, but these days, that is probably a bonus.

Logging on to Facebook is like wandering into the school cafeteria at lunchtime. You can see groups of people clustered around different tables, some you know, some you don’t. You can overhear snatches of conversation between your friends and friends of friends. You might even sit down and have a word with one or two of them. Then you leave, content knowing everyone is all right and having a good time and that they know that you are as well.

If, however, you’re looking to sit down over a buttered scone and a cup of tea with one of your closer friends, well then, you need to go somewhere else.

A blog, for instance, where you can ramble on for more than 140 characters, make a point, paint a scene, talk about something important to you in a meaningful way and not be forced to reduce it to, “Got dumped on Saturday. Really sucks. :(“

I was a long time coming to blogs, being happy in my Luddite world of HTML, but once I crossed over, I was hooked. Problem is, now that I am firmly settled in the blogshpere, I find they are, like, so 2008. I thought I was being hip, but I find myself, once again, sitting on the trailing edge of technology.

I just read an article claiming that e-mail will be extinct in another ten years. Seems it is being regarded as too old fashioned. The focus, the article claims, is shifting away from instantly sending a significant chunk of information directly to the person you want it delivered to and more toward broadcasting snippets of news to a wide group of people.

Texting, Facebook, Twitter—that’s what the hip young people are using these days. E-mail is, well, so, 2008.

It makes me want to crawl back to my HTML and hide,

F*&%$@G Facebook.

CROSS DRESSING BLOGS — a word of explanation:

In casting about so something new to write about, it came to my attention that the post on my Life of Writing blog has as much to do with writing as the post currently on my Postcards From Across the Pond blog has to do about being an expat. So, in the interest of buying myself more time (and perhaps gaining a few crossover fans) I have simply swapped them around.

I hope this doesn’t break some sort of blogshere code of honor or anything. I’m not trying to pull a fast one; I’m just too tired to write anything new (in the blog arena) at the moment.

And the best part it, the Sucking Face (book) post, when it goes on my Postcards blog, will automatically be posted to Facebook.