What is FaceBook Good For?
I recently gave in and set up a FaceBook page, mostly in the hope of getting more visibility for both my recent self-publishing projects and the considerable amount of my stuff that's freely available to be downloaded or read online—more or less a web page equivalent, but more visible. I'm coming to suspect that it's a tool poorly adapted to that purpose, but I haven't really figured out how it works well enough to be sure.
The first shock was when I "friended" my son Patri and suddenly my page was flooded with his conversations. Some of them are of mild interest to me, but I see no reason to expect other people to want to read them on my page instead of on his and I haven't figured out how to keep them from appearing, or if I can, or even if I can limit the volume of other people's stuff that automatically shows up on my page. I'm pretty much not accepting friend requests until I have a clearer idea how the system works, so don't be offended if I ignore yours. As I commented to someone elsewhere online, I may have to unfriend my firstborn.
I did manage to find a couple of people I haven't seen for decades—the two UCLA students to whom my Price Theory was dedicated—and send them "hullo, long time, how are you doing" style notes. And I put up a notice that I plan to be on panels at Westercon next week. Which I am guessing is more the sort of thing FaceBook is intended for.
I also set up a page on my own web site consisting of links to my work, both self-published for sale and free online, which should make finding stuff a little easier than by wandering my fairly substantial site; that page is now linked to my FaceBook page.
Advice from those more familiar with the system welcome.