To be genuinely confused at what some people use FB for?

[Megatron]

I love Facebook. I lets me keep in touch really easily with my family up north and in Canada, Australia and Hong Kong and I LOVE that. It can also be a great way or making arrangements etc etc.

But I just do NOT get some of the status updates I see. Today a friend has posted a photograph of an apple pie and there are 56 comments underneath it. 56. All saying 'yummy' or 'that looks nice' and 'lush'. I was assuming that it would be one of those conversations that merged into something completely different but no it was all about that pie. Why would a bunch of women in their 40s (or any age) do this?

Actually I know IABU as it's got bugger all to do with me I just can't be doing with these random photos of pies, shoes or glasses of wine that seem to appear all too often. I'll go now.....

Yabu cos I think its funny, nothing I like more than a delicious cake photo, or a disastrous one, which is more like mine!!

I'm having a rather uneasy relationship with Facebook at the moment. It's incredibly useful to keep in touch with the members of the family who are scattered around the world right now and also, it can be much quicker to confirm arrangements sometimes. But more and more I find it a stream of easily taken the wrong way consciousness and there's definitely a growing disinterest in people thinking before they post and then getting arsey when the inevitable grief kicks off. It does appear to have become a mechanism for feuding and one-upmanship, I'm afraid. Which is a shame because I like the whole concept of Facebook.

But of all the claptrap on Facebook, I find the cryptic status updates the most irritating. Especially since the tempting snippet that appears is always followed by nosy compassionate enquiries to which the standard response from the affronted one is "will pm you". If you aren't going to dish the dirt publicly then don't share anything!

I completely agree with Pandemoniaa. I think the problem with fb is that people are becoming too dependent on it. A couple of years ago I had a really awful burglary that turned violent and posted about it on facebook. At first it was just to let people know who had heard that we were ok but I was so upset that it seemed to become some kind of therapy for me and I started posting really private things about how upset I was and how scared I was of my own home. Nobody ever said anything to me about it in person or on facebook so I just continued to do it until one day I saw some random person that I barely knew post a status update just after mine and I realised that I'd been sharing this really private things with hundreds of people. I had a good 'friend' clearout and now rarely post anything. I think that if you are lonely or are at home a lot it feels like the perfect place to go for adult conversation (I work from home) and can be a huge relief, but some people maybe just forget how public it is. A friend of mine recently posted a rant about her boyfriend, she has over 600 'friends' (some of whom actually get her first name wrong in messages!) and he nearly finished with her because of it. Since then she has been a lot more careful. I think that until you get burned you tend to just forget about how public it really is.
Apart from the really bizarre or annoying updates, I really love fb. It is great for keeping in contact with family and friends around the world and I'm in contact with great people that I would have otherwise drifted away from due to schedules and distance.