Face.. wha..?

I finally gave in to the chorus of people reminding me that I (apparently) need a presence in the FaceBook world. So I opened a page, an account, a profile... whatever, for this Tour. Not a personal account– rather a Bad Boy Blues Tour account. Now as I'm lead to believe most of the world is on this thing anyway, the following probably won't come as news to you. I don't even know whether to call it an account, or a page, or what. The pages inside FB look pretty plain, and are cluttered up by ads for stuff like "lose belly fat." The rules and regulations, privacy policies, etc. are baffling. Apparently this will help connect fans to gigs, and will do amazing things for me, or rather the Tour. I guess I'm thinking that the main thing will be to route interested parties here to this– where we are now– the actual Blog, and its companion sites. And anything after that will be a bonus.

Now that I'm two or three days into it I've found I can visit FaceB sites, and I seem to be logged into the whole thing. Little pictures of people I might know come up in the corner, or sometimes by the page. The amazing thing is, I DO KNOW THESE PEOPLE. All of them! Beyond my name and personal email I provided FaceB no information at all for this "business profile," concert tour page. So clearly the search engines are working hard. The digital fingerprint is big. I don't find this disturbing, as I'm not particularly worried about Big Brother watching, and I guess I'd rather be targeted by ads for stuff I might be interested in. Maybe that's why the "belly fat" ads are coming up!

Next, I'm told I need "friends" for my site to be successful. Apparently this is not to be a problem. People have been sending me "friend" requests for years, and now there seem to be pages of them coming up. Each picture requests "click to make a friend request," or something like that. "Do not click unless you know this person," is the next routine. Hey, not a problem. I click on Richard Flohil, Ken Whiteley, Mark Stafford, and a few others I've known for years. Quickly I am bounced to another page where Face informs me that "do I understand that I must know these people personally!!?" And proceeds to suspend me, or rather my account, or something like this, for a period of 4 days. "Don't do it again, or we'll shut down your account!" "Click here to show that you understand!" That's more like the Big Brother I might of imagined.

So far FaceB has wasted more of my personal resources than it has provided. One hand of its search engines provides me with pages of "friends," (and I have done nothing to search these) while the other hand chastises me for clicking on them, telling me I don't actually know them! Ah, the world of social networking. Is it really such a low IQ world? No doubt I'll have advice pouring in on how to deal with FaceB. But I'm already considering just shutting it down. Life's too short, and I've got songs to write, gigs to book, shows to play. I guess I'll hang in and see what happens next.