I've been on Facebook for about 6 months now. I joined primarily because I have a few friends with young kids who post pictures of their kids there, and I wanted to be able to see how they change and grow over the years. I was a little concerned about my age relative to Facebook. I assumed, wrongly as it turns out, that Facebook - like MySpace - was primarily for "kids". I am not a kid. Haven't been for quite a while now. But I got a couple of invitations from friends not all that much younger than I am, so I figured I would try it.
When you join Facebook, you tell it what email account to associate with your Facebook profile. Facebook then searches that email account's address book against the list of Facebook users and prompts you to add any it finds as "friends." Now I, like most people, have a few email addresses on my list of emails for people with whom I have only limited contact. For example, one of the people in my address book is a guy who plays in a band that I go to see fairly routinely. He's in my book because I did some work with the guys a few years ago on their marketing materials, and I had added his email at that point and just never took it off. I've had the same email account since email first started becoming a popular thing in 1994. So this guy was on my list of people that Facebook popped up and asked me if I wanted to add as a friend. Well, I know him and he knows my name and we've talked a time or two at shows. So I thought what the heck. He can always say no, right? But he didn't. And we became Facebook friends. There were a couple of other examples of this in my address book - the woman who serves as medical director for the animal rescue organization with whom I volunteer was another one. She too was on Facebook and she too accepted my invitation to be her friend. Basically, I was too lazy to pick and choose among the addresses that Facebook found, so I just said send an invitation to all of them. What the heck?
When I talk to people about being on Facebook, one of the first questions I get is often, "So how many of your "friends" are people that you really don't know?" At first, I thought this was kind of a weird question. I mean, I had those few I mentioned, but most of the people who became my friends on Facebook are people that I genuinely know. Friends and family that I would normally email. After all, that's where the list started, right? In fact, I was shocked to find that Facebook came up with 42 such people from my address book. I never thought in a million years that I would know that many people on Facebook.
Facebook being a social networking thing, however, that list has grown and grown. The first person to find me on Facebook just completely out of the blue was my first boyfriend from back in 8th grade. He actually found me on LinkedIn first, and then one of us (I don't remember who) found the other on Facebook. It really makes much more sense of us to be connected on Facebook rather than LinkedIn, but still to make that connection again on either site was quite remarkable. And great fun. Several of my family members have joined since I joined, and there's now quite a network of us who share our thoughts and pictures when we never have before. Really fun. I was waiting for the day when the six degrees of separation thing happened and someone from my list knew someone I knew from a completely different setting. It finally happened this past weekend. A woman I know from a group of friends who met from hanging out at a bar went to high school with one of my old karate instructors. (see the "Old Friends" post.)
My initial list of 40 friends has gotten to be almost 100 people. I gained three more just today. There are still a few that I don't really know (one guy from my high school class that I wouldn't have known in a million years, but I figured why not). But most of that 100 people I do know. So I feel like I can say honestly, when asked, that most of my friends on Facebook are really my friends.
The thing is, before Facebook, if I had to tell you how many people I know in the world well enough to connect to them on a social networking site, I'd have said something like 40. And here I am, about to hit 100 friends. Amazing.
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