Apr 13, 2007
China Facebook Expat Group: LostLaowai
For anyone who’s not aware, Facebook is a new (well, relatively new…) social media site that allows you to create and expand a network of friends. If you have a hotmail or yahoo email account, you can search for your contacts automatically, and reconnect with tons of people you haven’t seen in ages.
I’m really surprised by the amount of people who are using facebook. Friends who you would never expect to be anywhere near a computer if their life depended on it, it seems they too love facebook. It’s a really neato tool, and I recommend it highly – even though I just made my account yesterday.
Facebook can also serve the purpose of building small communities here in China. Ryan has already put together the Lost Laowai Facebook Group, which is a group for expats all over China. You can visit the group, or sign up (for free) here:
Lost Laowai China Expat Facebook Group
Lost Laowai is a site for expats in China, and I occasionally contribute when I’m not too busy. Click here to see my latest article, where I go toe-to-toe with a Yale Professor on the subject of China. I swear ta gawd, these guys gotta get out from behind their desks once in a while.
For those of you who keep blogs, Facebook’s Notes function can be integrated via RSS so that your blog posts are brought into Facebook, and posted to My Notes.
For anyone who wants to check out the Chinese equivalent of facebook, you might want to have a look at Xiaonei.com, in case you missed it before.
China Stolen-Media-of-the-Day: 24, Seasons 1 & 2
I know I’m a little late jumping on the 24 bandwagon, but hey, I’m in China – and well – that’s how the media is here.
But in any case, for anyone who wants to take a look back, or for any of you guys who may have missed it the first time around, here is the full first season of 24, and the second season as well. Careful! It’s addictive…
Hey man, thanks for pluggin’ the LLW Facebook group. As I am also new to Facebook, and only created the thing a couple days ago… we’ve already got a good solid membership growing. Fun stuff.
Excellent. Good to hear.
It’ll be cool to put a face to the names of all the people floating around out there.
Facebook… a site that request personal email adderss passwords in order to register. Flickster do this too. So far they’ve not abused these privaleges.
But… it’s not surprising they’re growing. They offer some functionality, but the growth is because everyone gets spammed-by-proxy by a friend acting as agent for Facebook (which makes it OK I guess).
At best it’s a viral way to grow a website. At worse it’s a ploy to uncover millions of email accounts. I think it lays firmly in-between. But I think the president such sites face is 100% negative as regular Internet users should be encouraged NOT to give out their passwords. Maybe next month another ‘cool’ site is launched which is less upstanding with regards to privacy. It’s irresponsible and market-(money-) grubbing behaviour.
I will not be using Facebook in the near future until they stop this strategy, and I’d encourage others to avoid this, or at least seek alternatives.
eh…
I’m not that protective about my email addresses. If anyone wants my hotmail they can have it. I have about 465 new emails and counting…
Plus I gots a yahoo account and numerous other useless email accounts.
But yeah, that it a little bit odd…