I’m sort of a Facebook infant in the grand scheme of things. I resisted for a long while and didn’t sign up until July of this year. It was the same week, in fact, that Facebook announced its 500 millionth member. I have to wonder if that milestone member was actually me — and, more importantly, shouldn’t I have won something for my impeccable timing? I guess not. (Mark Zuckerberg, if you get this, have your girl call my girl.)
“Wait. You just joined Facebook in July?”
Before you call me a total dinosaur, I’ll defend myself and say I was tweeting, Linking In and Four Squaring long before I was Facebooking. And I lurked on my husband’s Facebook account from time to time — a sort of Beta entry, if you will. So I wasn’t running around wondering what the heck “that Facebook” was all about. I knew.
It was my then-impending high school reunion that finally brought me over to the dark side. Given that he had no affiliation whatsoever with my high school, it just would have been plain weird to sign up for the reunion under P’s account, right? So it was time for me to bust out and get my own account with my own friends and my own ghosts of my own past.
Now, I am a captive audience to this time sucking zone of blue and white web pages. I enjoy it. Maybe I’m still in the extended honeymoon phase, but I like catching up with old friends and old acquaintances, seeing their photos, knowing what they are up to.
**To an extent.**
I’ll never be the gal with hundreds of Facebook friends. I’m not that popular, which I came to terms with years ago in the offline world, and frankly, I don’t think I like quite that many people beyond common courtesy. But that’s OK.
You know why? Because Jimmy Kimmel said so.
I know the people he’s talking about — the people whose every move is documented on Facebook. It’s dizzying. I’m sure there’s some relevance here to how friendship and communication have evolved over time. And I have to believe that, at this phase of the game, entire dissertations have been devoted to some generational analysis of blah blah blah [white noise here]…so let’s leave the real insight to the academics and social media gurus who can more elegantly explain it. Me, I’m just here to support Jimmy Kimmel.
As for the folks with hundreds of Facebook friends, if you have the time, God bless. I have a very close relative with over 700 Facebook friends. But I think she may be the exception to Jimmy’s late night rant — she really is friends with many of these folks. Before you ask me how that’s possible, I’ll just stop you and say please take my word for it. Better yet, I may ask her to guest blog about the art of maintaining a large, global friend base. She is a master. I can barely remember my husband’s birthday.
As for the rest of us mere mortals who are only liked by and enjoy the company of a limited amount of people, no worries. A few updates now and then, a photo of your kids, some life changes on Facebook — and we’re good. I’ll try to keep it to an acceptable minimum as well. It’s sort of the unspoken deal — well, as far as I’m concerned anyway.
And if I fail to uphold my end of the deal (and sometimes I do), you can add me to your purge list on November 17, just like Jimmy said.
What about you guys? Do you have some fat to trim on your FB roster or did you keep it lean?
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