Facebook - Love it or hate it?

I had been a late adopter of the social networking site, Facebook. Initially, I always thought of these sites as a waste of time, as I did IRC and other tools like IM , Yahoo Messenger and the ilk. I was invited to Facebook by one of my friends, who I'd not seen in a couple of years. He had e-mailed me a link to share photos of his newborn baby. Well at that time we just viewed the photos and totally forgot about it. Wasn't interested in Facebook.

Up until a recent family vacation, where a large group of few families were involved, there arose a need to share and comment on some of the photos taken. That's when I remembered Facebook. Since I had a sizable collection of them, I signed up, created and account and started posting. Lo and behold, apparently I wasn't the first one in my family to be on there. All cousins, siblings, nephews,nieces and even a few old friends were already on and very active.



Up until recently, our family was beginning to drift apart. With all of us having our own careers, family and living in different parts of the country, get together's were very few and far in between. So out went birthdays, weddings, parties and the rest. Keeping up with what each one was doing; was relegated to the odd phone call, and that only if we made the time for it. Sadly, even those calls were very infrequent. Now through Facebook, were are now all somehow magically re-connected and are well abreast of each others activities.


Facebook has filled the social void, that physical distance brought about. And we are interacting more with each other than ever before. But it doesn't end there. Through the 'friend-finder' I have been able to re-connect with my alma-mater, got in touch with friend from elementary school whom I'd forgotten about for years. And the same with them. The joy of getting in touch with people you've not seen in decades is a rush and likewise for them remembering you and talking about old times.

What prompted me to blog about this, is last week I had been able to get in touch with my college mates. We were quite tight back then, had a band together. Started to lose contact when I left to work in Indonesia. After that could not re-establish contact (those were the days before mobiles). I found out that they were just still as tight; even went on vacations together. I had missed a few weddings.

If only I had looked for them earlier... For the past few weeks I've been feeling nostalgic, thinking bout all the good times we've had, seeing what my friends were up to now. Especially with a lot of old photos being posted and being tagged, talking about the days gone by...wow.. We should plan to get together and meet up again.



We'll that's the good. The bad; Facebook is addictive. can such up your time, and my wife would gladly attest to this. and it can get painfully slow at times. Even my wife has used Facebook to re-connect with a lot of her old work and college mates too.

So our collective friend list has grown from a nice family circle, to close friends to now a nice list of about 50 or so old friends each, which by the way is a nice manageable number. Now the challenge is more on controlling who gets to see what and type of news to be shared and such, and how frequent we want updates are from each of our friends. (Must have some control on privacy too..he.he)

And so to Facebook, like it or not...unproductive of not..we thank you...

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