facebook has its good points. I am on some local gardening facebook pages and a great plant identification Facebook pages where if you show a picture of a plant almost immediately people from around the country will answer you very quickly about the name of it. The administrators have to keep people on topic constantly to keep it specific to what the plant is and cut down on the chit chat. It’s a good idea, but it would bring other issues to the group that administrators may not have the time to deal with. Vapid is a good word.
I do not mind having a facebook page.
I have FB account but I hardly ever use it! Someone said it’s more of an entertainment value media, not knowledge discussion forum. I totally agreed.
I vote No to FB.
Facebook is for stalkers and thieves. A good resource for possible clients.
I hate Facebook
Nope!
I enjoy Facebook and use it daily, but it serves a different function than this forum. If the forum were to have a Facebook page, in my mind the primary benefit would be a means for interested fruit growers to find us, as Facebook is much more visible.
There are still valuable contributors from Gardenweb that don’t know this forum exists.
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I would say no. FB is obviously playing a huge role in many peoples’ lives, which is fine; people do all sorts of things I have little interest in myself. Everyone has different activities they think are worthwhile or fun. But I think there is an element of The Medium is the Message (McCluhan): discussions on facebook are inclined to be in a single wandering thread with short and often content free blurbs from a vast array of people. If multiple topics are discussed, it just gets chaotic and disjointed. That is not the best fit for the topics treated on this forum; we want inherent ability to keep many threads going at once and support for longer form interaction, and most importantly great tools for organizing the accumulated information and threads as they develop. In my opinion the setup of this forum is a perfect match for the subject at hand and the admins are doing an excellent job running it. I have participated in many a forum, and I am really liking the technical and structural features of this one, in addition to the great content. I also love the non-commercial, advertising free format so far; what a relief it is to hang out here!
Personally, I deactivated my FB account years ago and almost every day I feel happy I don’t have the kind of life or job which would force me into FB. Sometimes I miss out on some information that is ONLY available on FB, and that is annoying. Like the details to a high school reunion last year were only listed on the facebook page, so I couldn’t access them without logging in. But on the whole, I think it is more than worth it.
Some advertising or announcements on FB could be useful to bring in people who might be interested and have not otherwise discovered the forum, but I think people putting a blurb about it on their personal page would do the job. If any of you do Twitter you could put out a tweet saying how you are liking this forum. For me, Twitter is another medium I find it a real joy to not be obligated to employ.
NO to FB for this group! I enjoy the present format and FB would only detract.
When I was a system administrator we noticed that about 1/2 of our Internet bandwidth was consumed by folks viewing or posting to FB at work. It was a huge waste of time and money and we shut it down unless it was business related.
On the other hand FB can be a great marketing tool. We use it for our U-pick farm and it produces awesome results for free. We are amazed by the number of folks who tell us they located our farm on Facebook
itheweatherman - What are the advantages you saw for a FB page? As someone not using FB, I am curious why you see a benefit.
I myself no longer have an acct either, and I see starting a FB page for this group as dividing the forum, it would be hard to keep up with both.
I see Facebook as another internet tool trying to find a way to make money off of me. It wants to hook me into diddling my time away and it wants to discover my interests and then persuade me to spend money. It’s a soul-sucking, time-wasting parasite, the antithesis of why I love growing things. It makes my sisters-in-law post endless, pointless, and mostly unread quotes and cartoons 
… and then my wife gets irritated … and then there goes another afternoon, and I don’t even do facebook …
Just my two cents worth, but seriously, please, no.
Thanks,
Mark
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