I joined Facebook during my last trip to the US of A in September 2008. I was in San Francisco for 3 weeks for Oracle Open World 2008 and 2 SOA related training programs our Product Manager and I were doing. I called my college (IIT Kharagpur) mate, Rajiv Kaushik, and badgered him for the phone numbers / email addresses of our common friends living in the Bay area. Rajiv advised me to get a Facebook account.
And I must say that Facebook did help me find my old friends fast, much faster than I had thought possible.
But I am not an active user. I find that I don't have any time during the day and secondly I am often away from my room and laptop. Evening and late night computing sessions are given over to research, personal finance, blogging, web site maintenance, cataloging my digital media acquisitions etc. Facebook just does not fit in for me, particularly since I haven't seen a half decent mobile application worth using. I tried Fring but was disappointed. I just upgraded Fring to the latest release but haven't tested it yet. The biggest problem with Facebook on Fring is the sluggish UI. Menus take up to 15 secs to open! Not acceptable.
I tried the mobile phone's (Sony Ericsson P1i) web browser. Not Opera Mini but the built in browser. I posted a test update to see how things work. The UI is compact and lightweight enough to be fast. I will try that for a few days and see how it goes.
I am almost completely mobile now. Other than the Jabber based instant messaging solution used at work. I use Fring for Yahoo, GTalk, MSN & AOL. Also for Orkut to some extent but I prefer the phone's web browser for Orkut. Profimail keeps me in constant touch with my personal and work emails. One email client that handles all my email accounts! Very highly recommended! The built in RSS Reader keeps me in touch with news of my interest. Google and it's world is available any where and at any time. HandyDay and the SynchML based, built in Remote Synch program keeps me in constant touch with my calendar.
I recently realized that my current lifestyle forces certain choices on me. I will use a product or service only if it offers a good mobile UI. Lets see if Facebook will become one of my commonly used tools.
