I’ll have to admit that I have been slow to adapt to “Web 2.0″ technologies. When I was in my early 20′s, the Internet was just starting to flourish. There were a lot of technologies out there that pushed and pulled information. Plus there were chat rooms, forums (which aren’t very different from blogs), bookmark tools like Backflip and other technologies. I played with a lot of them. My computer was customized to the nth degree; and my file management system was inscrutiably organized.

Fast forward to 2008. My file management system is in place, but there are a lot of stray files that are not organized as they should be, my address book is not always in synch and I usually don’t bother with a whole lot of customization other than a wallpaper for my desktop.

The change has to do with time and priorities. I can say with pleasure that my time on my computer is less frivilous, although I do spend some of it goofing off, but my goofing off time is usually spent reading something on politics, general news or technology. (Rather than just chatting).

Modern social networking just did not interest me. Having exercised that temptation as a 20 something, and also having spent endless hours playing video games as a teenager, I know how it can suck up an awful amount of time. So I not only wasn’t interested, I was almost an advocate against it.

But things do run full circle. As a technologist whose focus is on Internet Technologies, I really have to be “with it”, and so I took some time to really explore Facebook.

Facebook seems to be better than Myspace, despite its lack of hyper customization. But I’m biased. I found so many people that I’ve been friends with in the past are on Facebook. In fact, it’s practically a college reunion! And so it became an invaluable resource to get reacquainted with so many people that I lost contact with.

It took me quite some time to really “get” the appeal of Facebook and I still think a great deal of it, along with Myspace is simply silly. (And I guess there is room for that in my life once in awhile. J ).

Only recently did I take the time to really discover how powerful it could be. And I’m sure there are a few things I haven’t yet explored.

The primary focus of this blog was always to keep my friends up to date in my life and to share photos.

For the first objective, I set up the Wordbook RSS feed from this blog, to my Facebook profile. For the second objective, I also installed the fotobook plugin into WordPress that allows me to capture my Facebook photos, and turn them into a gallery on this blog. It is so much easier to upload the photos onto Facebook than it is to do it in WordPress, even with version 2.51.

I’m very happy with this integration and it truly excites me to be able to use mashup technologies in my real life.