I was reading an interesting and fun article by Sarah Perez on How to Make Facebook Useful Again . *
The author points out that the younger crowd has almost completely turned to Facebook or MySpace for communication – including emailing. In a way, it’s understandable. It’s a little bit like living in a gated community, at least you have to be a member and I have to approve you as a friend before we can communicate. My normal inbox doesn’t work that way and wading through email is probably one of the biggest time wasters we deal with in a workday.

“If it’s not in my Outlook – it doesn’t exist.”
That was life in 2001 or so, but now I have completely weened myself from Outlook. I stopped using Outlook due to the spam I received. I hate learning new software, so it’s always easier to hang on to what your familiar with, and I’ve been doing just that for years. I used Word, Excel, Act and Outlook when I worked for Big Biz. So when we started our own business, we just used familiar software. First Act had to go, and guess what – in just a few years Outlook followed, and recently I decided not to install Microsoft Office either.

Open Office is free, and I don’t really use it that much any more. Most of my conversations is email, twitter or IM based, and if I need to write a text document I often end up using Google docs so I can share it with my group. I have installed Irfan and Gimp, but I still use Photoshop. I just don’t bother to open Photoshop to just resize a picture for example. And the other day, I started thinking about getting rid of my old, trusted friend Quickbooks. A small business like ours doesn’t have pay roll, we don’t keep inventory and Quickbook is probably overkill.

Now I don’t think everything can be free, but lately I find myself more open to trying a new solution instead of going with the old familiar choice. Things change so quickly in technology. It’s hard to believe that once upon a time I actually had sleepless nights over the fact that we had to switch to Adobe InDesign for our graphics work instead of using my old friend Quark Xpress.
Please…

Nowadays I tell my kids “if it’s not in the Family Google Calendar, it doesn’t exist”!

* How to Make Facebook Useful Again on www.readwriteweb.com by Sarah Perez