Facebook Friends: the More the Merrier?

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Mitch Goldberg wants to be my friend? Oh, my God.

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I haven’t seen Mitch since UCSB and those magical walks along the beach experimenting with the kind of salad ingredients that prompt spiritual awakenings. It was on one of those trips that I experienced an epiphany, deciding if I could organize my dorm room closet, I could get all A’s. That Mitch Goldberg?

Facebook provides a new kind of face-to-face contact with other humans, ready or not. The popular and apparently addictive social networking site lets us reunite with old friends who look frighteningly old, write on a wall (the white man’s virtual graffiti), and play voyeur to other people’s vacation photos.

The buddy of your cousin’s who saw you on someone’s page invites you to be friends. If you confirm, you can add him or her to the list of “recently added friends” stacking up on your profile. And that’s how it’s played. Of course, some jokers, like by brother’s best childhood friend, Dan Roman, didn’t post his own photo (below), but stole someone else’s: someone with hair!

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Collecting Facebook friends is all the rage, as compulsive as amassing Beanie Babies and Peek-a-Poohs, leaving you with a big pile that begs the question, now what? Are you suppose to play with all you have accumulated?

I went kicking and screaming into the domain, my 13-year-old daughter insisting it’s the best thing ever, better than watching staged home videos like Charlie Bit My Finger on You-Tube, better than shopping for Uggs. What the heck!

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My daugher has 92 friends. Some of them are cute boys who are too scared to ask her to be their friend verbally. Instead, they click on the Add Friend option, the pop cult version of writing “have a bitchin’ summer” in a classmate’s yearbook. You show you’re interested without taking too much of a risk.

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According to Media Metrix, Facebook is the 6th most-trafficked site in the U.S. with 1% of all internet time logged on. There are 120 million users worldwide with an increasing number of them teens. Teens are writing on walls when they should be doing homework, brushing their teeth or pleasure reading. The 30-something crowd also is a growing fan club. The site has been banned in some work sites because it hurts productivity.

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I guess that’s what made Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, (above) the youngest billionaire around at age 24, with a net worth of $1.5 billion. He cooked up the idea as a sophomore at Harvard in 2004, then took it off campus and extended usage to anyone 13 and over. His headquarters are in Palo Alto, Ca. and according to Fast Company, he still walks or rides his bike to work in student garb and rents an apartment with a mattress on the floor. Lucky computer geek genius boy. I wish he’d hire me to design his apartment. I wonder how many friends are on his site?

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I now have 42 friends and growing. I’ve become a user, one of those networkers who log on daily, answering the Facebook question, What are you doing right now? and checking to see how many new friends I have made. It will be long time before I catch up with my daughter, but then again, only about 15 kids signed my high school yearbook and I’m only in contact with one of them, my best childhood friend Wendy Klein, who hasn’t added me yet. She’s really behind in the whole computer scene.

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If you want to be my Facebook friend, you should really be my friend. I think it’s odd for people who hardly know me to check out my family Halloween photos and shots of my Italy vacation. Don’t you? But then, again, maybe it all comes down to what got this country in the crazy pickle it is now in: the numbers. The more, the merrier? I ‘m not so sure.

Luanne Bradley

Luanne Sanders Bradley is the West coast Editor at EcoSalon and currently resides in San Francisco, California.