and yet and yet
You can *borrow* the herd beasts if you are good.
I'm pleased you're nice and reasonable, I do hate online slanging matches THEY DEMEAN US ALL (except for the people who can't get any demeaned-er, of course). So.
I get the annoyances, totally, and I know it doesn't suit everyone. I must say though that MySpace lends itself far more to idiocy and general fuckwittery and spammage than FB. It's a different culture - in my experience, hardly any actual strangers try and add you or contact you at all on FB, whereas any and every fucker with a project or a band or a thing or a millisecond to kill or a desperate need for personal validation through online statistics will bother you on MySpace. Which is mostly why I've left mine idle - as far as I'm concerned it's only useful for finding music, and it hurts my eyes.
I do use phone and email. As well. In conjunction with or independently of. I just find that I find out about things to organise via phone and email, through FB. And perhaps I'm just fortunate (I know people who've had all kinds of bother and ballaches with it) but I honestly don't find that I'm deluged with crap at all, from any angle. In fact, it's got me the odd bit of work, which is well worth the occasional, eminently ignorable 'which root vegetable are you?' request.
The privacy issues - yeah, it's a tough one, and I'm keeping an eye on it (The Reg being handy for that). It'd probably be more principled of me to leave, but that would seem a bit foot-meet-self-inflicted-bullet at the moment.
I think you've probably already revised that opinion, otherwise you wouldn't be discussing this with me, a non-drooler. And er, well, I don't really mind much if you revise it or not. But of course I don't think everyone who hates it has a big haughty snot on. Just lots of them. (OK, I'll concede you're not one of them. Well, not much...)
Dear me. This is cutting into my Facebook time.