As is cellphones weren’t enough to overload the human animal, now we have Facebook. If you aren’t yet on Facebook, you should definitely check it out. I warn you though, you may get sucked in to answering too many messages for way too long from friends you knew way too long ago. At least, that’s how its been for me. If anyone has added me recently who isn’t from the past, it’s likely I’ve offended them because I’ve been answering the question “what have I been up to the last 20 years” to a growing backlog of people I have known.
Facebook is a good thing when it connects people and enables them to catch up. It is, however, a serious time zapper. If you put yourself on Facebook, be ready for a potential Facebook friend overload. Because I sometimes feel guilty when people message me there because I don’t remember them, I added this caveat today:
I only remember about 70% of the people who contact me here. Fortunately, I usually remember after a few messages. The passage of time in this universe is certainly something to marvel at. I never realized how many people I’ve known until Facebook
Are you on Facebook? Share your thoughts.
4 Comments
It’s rather incredible, isn’t it? What I’m also finding pretty cool is “small world” findings when I see people’s “friends in common”. I was friended yesterday by the wife of another cop that my husband works with. She’s not even from Chicago. I look at her page and see on the “friends in common” my next door neighbor from when I was 5 or 6! I asked how she knew her and it turned out that my old next door neighbor had married her brother!
On the flip side of strange, there is that “people you might know” feature….there is one person that keeps popping up and it says we have 23 friends in common. I’ve asked them and I found out we went to HS together at one time or another, but I have no recollection of her at all. That makes me feel bad and is kind of scary at the same time!
I was on myspace for awhile, but then I got locked out my account…then on facebook somebody hacked into my account and started spamming so I deleted that account unfortunately too…so in a way it is good I don’t have it sucking up my time…
@Chelle: I got locked out of MySpace because I totally forgot the email I used to create it. Am I an idiot or what? Anyway … I got back in by taking a picture of myself holding my account number. It was so funny, I think I deleted it. But since they let me back in I’ve been careful to keep track of that stuff!
Chelle’s example points to one of my key fears about Facebook, and one of the key reasons why I am not active on it – security.
Starting with only the information revealed about a person in Facebook, a BBC investigation once found that it was possible to combine this information with other information about the individuals concerned which was in the public domain and open bank accounts and credit card accounts in their names.
To be sure, you can elect not to show your personal information to your friends. But Facebook staff can still access your information, and all it would take is for either a hacker to break into the network, or for one corrupt Facebook employee to leak or sell information, and your very sensitive personal information could so easily fall into the wrong hands.