As you may recall, I joined Facebook last month. And so far, I have 11 friends there: two Leeds United Ladies players, one long-lost (ish) friend in South Africa and a lot of present and former cadets (and Emma and Vickie). In real life, I see most of these people anyway.
Now, I could add lots of friends (or, at least, invite them), and get my number up to near the numbers that most of my friends have… but why should I? If I had 100+ friends on Facebook, how many of them would I actually write to, poke, throw sheep at or anything else? In what sense is Facebook a substitute for a real life?
Maybe the real point is that I still don’t get the point of Facebook. It isn’t like Friends Reunited, it doesn’t have the depth of a blog or diary site and some of the famous people aren’t actually the famous people they purport to be (count the Halle Berrys and Chris Kamaras). Some of the apps are good, but they’ll come to WordPress in some format, eventually. The most useful part is the updates, but that can be done via Twitter now (if only there was a way to update one and automatically update the other…).
I hasten to add that this diatribe is not fuelled by the lack of writings on my wall, nor the lack of sheep being thrown at me. But add the fact that no-one ever wrote a comment in this site when it was possible to, and perhaps it’s more like real life that I’d care to admit…