I caved and joined facebook

I caved. I was determined not to sign up for facebook, an online community where you can connect with friends and acquaintances, both old and new. The ingenious thing about facebook is that you can't do anything with facebook until you've registered. You can't go in and see who's there that you know. And it lets people invite you to facebook. So I would get an invite from someone, click on the link and be told I have to sign up first. So finally, after enough invitations, I signed up this past weekend and I haven't left the computer since. No, I am kidding. In fact I've been extremely busy with non-computer things since I signed up but have managed to spend an hour or so there. I can see how people get addicted though. When you find a friend you can click to see his list of friends and if you find someone you know in that list then you can click to see her list of friends and maybe there is someone you know there so you click... you can see where I am going here.

To start, you have to set up your own profile. You can put as much or as little as you like in your profile and then you can start looking for friends to invite to be your friend or hope that people will invite you to be their friend. Sort of like grade 8. Then there are networks you can belong to and groups you can join or set up yourself. There is also something called a poke which I am apparently too old to understand. I read somewhere that you can poke people and they can poke back if they want. What the poke means is up to you. So I poked a couple of friends, they poked me back and now this is listed on my facebook front page, asking me if want to poke them back. Since I can't write anything to them while I'm poking, I don't see the point of any more poking. Then they'd poke me back and I'd poke them back and... you can see where I am going here.

Everyone has different compartments of friends in their lives--people from work or school or from your hometown or whatever and facebook knows this so it asks you how you know each of your friends. You can find extra contacts that way. It's about finding connections and you do. The most extraordinary thing about facebook, for me, has been looking through the list of my friends' friends and finding that they know someone I didn't realize they knew. So, an old high school friend you haven't seen in years, might know someone you worked with last year. Facebook is interesting and I'll definitely drop in at least every day, but I hope I won't get addicted to it. There's enough to take up my time now. But in the time I have been writing this blog, I had a new friend request (they like me, they really like me) and someone wrote on my wall. Oh yeah, there's a "wall" on your profile page and people can write on it. So someone can write something to you and you can either write back on your wall or click on "wall-to-wall" and then your reply will go on her wall and then she could click on wall-to-wall and her response could go on your wall and then...you can see where I am going here.

Addictive? How could that be addictive?

You are 22% Addicted to Facebook.

You are not addicted to facebook.

For you it's just another fad that you won't subscribe to.

'How Addicted to Facebook are you?' at QuizGalaxy.com