So I recently set up an account on Facebook. Well actually I had set up an account awhile ago but never really got around to doing anything with it. For whatever reason a few days ago I started adding friends and setting up a “real” page.

It’s interesting – I consider myself fairly technical. From programming in BASIC on my TI-994A (and saving not to a disk but to an actual audio-cassette!?!?), to “surfing” text-based BBSes on my 300-baud modem to seeing the evolution of Mosaic / Netscape and the beginnings of the WWW when I was in college, I’ve enjoyed technical stuff like this. I mean I am a computer nerd to the extreme after all!

But it seems like I’ve never been an early adopter of some of the more “social” Internet applications. I remember one of my friends sending me a link back in 97 or 98 to use this “new” thing called AOL instant messenger. I believe she was on AOL and it was recently after AOL had opened IM up to non-AOL users. I remember thinking “This is dumb”. I of course signed up later and now IM on a regular basis.

Similarly blogging – blogs were around long before I started in April 2005. I actually think I was a bit earlier on this one – I was certainly the first one in my (at least somewhat close) family to have one – a trend that has certainly expanded.

So now we are on to Facebook. Again as with IM, part of me thinks “this is dumb”. But another part of me thinks this might be a good way to keep in touch with some people. I was reading a comment on the Facebook page of someone I went to high school with saying something along the lines of “I wish they had had this when we were in HS – I lost touch with so many people” and that rings very true to me. There are lots of people that I was good friends with in High School that I no longer talk to. Of course there are also plenty of people that I’m glad to have lost contact with :-). So with that in mind, let me introduce Dan’s 5 categories of Facebook Friends!

1. The real friends. These are people that I am fairly close to already and / or talk to / see in person on a somewhat regular basis. People like say my wife or my mom etc.

2. Acquaintances / friends / family that I don’t see that often but that I am interested in following along with. This might be cousins or church-friends or work-friends etc.

3. Acquaintances / friends / family that I’m not really that interested in following along with but I added as friends because hey why not. If you’re not sure if you’re in group 2 or 3, I’ll let you decide 😀

4. People that I’ve lost touch with and I want to see what they’re up to. For me, this is mostly friends and such from High School or my mission. It will be interesting to see how many people I catch up with here. It’s challenging to go from the “Hey what have you been doing for the past 10 years” to a real fake Internet relationship.

5. Then there’s the “friends” that I add just because I’m a “friend-whore“. They’re the people that you vaguely know. Like anyone that may have ruined the Forest Elementary School touch football game in 5th grade (yes he’s on there) or people that I barely knew in high school. Actually I don’t have too many of these (yet). I just haven’t brought myself to that point, much less trying to add people that I don’t even know (which I guess some people do).

Anyways we shall see how it goes… I do think that social networking sites like this (or MySpace or Twitter etc) are not going anywhere. As this technology matures and even more kids that have grown up on this start becoming adults, it’s just going to continue. My friend Jeff wrote a post about this the other day. He was mentioning what advice he would give new computer programmers and he said “The ability to communicate with others (read: business leaders) will be the single most important thing you can work on as a developer. Your ability to think and communicate effectively to your management will go MUCH farther than your ability to apply polymorphism principles to your application. Trust me.” I think this is very true.

So that’s about all I have to say on this. We got a renter for our place and will be moving to the new house within a week or two!!