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In over a decade doing all this webby publishing networking stuff, nothing I've seen has captured the imagination and conversation of non-web-geeks than social networking behemoth Facebook.

Indeed, friends who stared at me glassy-eyed while I spieled on about paradigm shifts, convergence, personal web publishing, and sharing with strangers who are now friends, are now quickly on my case about not clicking on the widgety apps they send me to become a pirate, hug/poke/tickle them, take a quiz, install an application, vote on something incidental, compare traits or skills, or catch up on people I don't remember from Jr. High.

Further, if I'm not tapped into Facebook conversations, I miss out on the friends' event announcements (as Facebook has usurped Upcoming etc. for event announcements for many folks) and social media which ends up only on FB rather than personal blogs as the default publication point.

So ... all this background leads up to Facebook adding non-personal entities to the options. This means companies can have a place of their own in the FB empire allowing them to send out announcement to "fans" and build up yet another presence to promote their projects, give details and promote events.

Raincity Studios has dutifully complied with the will of the Interweb and now boasts a humble shack on the FB frontier. Stop by and exchange friendly checkbox greetings affirming our relationship of mutual admiration and stay tuned in for more tinkering in this hyper-huge, mega-network.

While I am not a big FB-flagwaver, I've certainly pow wowed with those less-cynical about all the reasons behind FB's success (notably making something techie feel untechie) and I am hip to the open API.

I also get how FB acts a "meta-network," spawning and aggregating myriad tiny/huge subcultures. Further, I understand that FB apps are the *newest exciting* marketing hack and every company is breathlessly exploring how to capture attention, connections and eyeballs - Case in point: Kinzin's fantastically successful outreach campaign using the "Are you Normal?" app.

What I don't get is people's love of digging up old chums and relationships from decades past. Sure school was fun and all that - in the 80s! Thanks to FB, I now know that the high school i dropped out of is having a 20 year reunion this year (sorry but I'll pass on that).

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Plus, I am relieved to know that a variety of elementary school class photos are archived forever (pending massive electrical storm wiping out the data storage devices of the world ;-)) featuring me in a sequence of stripey shirts and hip glasses.

I also don't get why someone would want to publish their "stuff" in such a big, non-personally-branded container. I enjoy having my own URLs, custom interfaces, knowing where my data lives and who controls it (me!). Am i Normal? Perhaps not.

It seems I am an "edge case" maybe because I am long-time, indie-minded content publisher and I don't see any substantial ease of use reasons to upload to Facebook instead of my own bloghome. Sure, I re-aggregate my posts in hopes folks will read what I have to say but I sure don't send out a constant chain of bacn to stay personally "top of mind" to each of my friends (some of whom are actually friends!)

Who knows, if enough people sign up to be Raincity Studios' fans, my skepticism may fade a wee bit.