Facebook Mobile, or The Demise of Society
So, the Facebook, the college student's prefered social networking site ( Cooler than Friendster, not as business oriented as Linkedin, and not as VD-ridden as MySpace), just did some Facebook Mobile stuff, and allowed students to set their "status."
Now, first of all, the Status thing. they let you update it from your cell phone or from the facebook website itself. But, there is no way to do it from your desktop, and that is annoying and a reason I won't use it for true reasons. Maybe if they integrated it with your class schedule, so it could switch status automatically, or just get it from your AIM away message, but right now it seems like too much trouble to be worth it.
Secondly, the whole Facebook Mobile works entirely through TXT messages. (I don't even know how the facebook website would look on a cell phone web browser, but probably not that great beacuse it still uses tables and not entirely CSS, but I don't know and can't make a comment on that) Now, cell phone carriers love this because they make money off those TXT messages. Facebook loves it because it is more traffic (although sans ads, but they can still use that to show how much traffic they get and say that people shold pay more for ads). Students love this because it is now another distraction in class.
The distraction in class is going to be HUGE HUGE HUGE. Now kids don't even need to bring their laptops to waste time. Just spend time sending around TXT messages instead of paying attention. Just bad news all around.... The facebook is a Website, it is not a stock quote or a sports score. Those are little bits of information that cannot be sent around on mobile pieces the same way.
[why is one of the facebook CSS stylesheets named facebookpro.css? I think there is some foulplay afoot]