[Vintage Season]

I'll play.

Facebook? I withstood any and all pressure to join that - or any other - social networking site until a little over a month ago, when I decided to test the waters with my little self-published ode to the Golden Age of Sci-Fi, "We Don't Plummet Out of the Sky Anymore." Suddenly I was hearing from people who liked it, and wanted to know more about my writing. One of those people happened to be a lot more familiar with the way readers and writers connect in this modern world than I am, and she said, "If you are going to be serious about this the very next step you must take is to set up a Facebook 'fan' page."

I did so a few days later, because I started thinking of random authors and asking, "I wonder if Alexander McCall Smith is using Facebook?" Every time the answer turned out to be "yes," I would try to think of another author with good stories and a devoted following, to pose the same question. Very soon it became clear that as an author, I could not ignore social networking... and like it or not, that meant Facebook.

Now from the perspective of your original question, I jumped on board at what was the worst possible moment. Within days, Facebook began a campaign of massive structural changes, and got all sorts of interesting publicity. Did everyone suddenly jump ship? Nope. Did the people who had become "fans" (or under the FB NewSpeak structure, who "like" me as an author) suddenly disappear? Nope. Did I suddenly stop seeing any new fans? Nope. To my pleasant surprise, I keep getting more and more visits.

Hardly anyone, aside from vocal privacy advocates and those inclined to dig into such issues, seems to care what Facebook is doing... which is what Facebook was counting on, all along.

Am I concerned about privacy? Very. Did I tweak all my settings and opt out of anything that seemed unnecessary? You betcha. Am I going to abandon Facebook? Not unless everyone who has expressed an interest in my stories goes away first!

Social networking is here to stay. It requires a tremendous amount of energy and viral marketing out the wazoo to successfully launch a new platform. It will require much more than anything we have yet seen to topple one.

- M.