Facebook

[Lemur]

The internet should be about brining together people from all around the world, of different nationalities, viewpoints and origins. Facebook brings together people you have always been together with, so they all have the same nationalities, viewpoints and origins.

FWIW, when you're an older dude like me, you tend to have friends all over the world. Some of my buds are downright vagrant, moving from job to job and country to country. Facebook is a godsend for keeping track of them.

Let's take one example at random -- the Modly family. Old, old friends of mine, who jumped from Chicago to Tunisia for six years. Now they're in Seoul, but often enough they're in Malaysia. They change email addys and phone numbers more often than you chage your socks. Pre-Facebook, keeping tabs on them was a nightmare. Now I can just check their family page to see their current contact info. This is convenient.

Likewise an old writer pal of mine, who drifts from city to city. I know he's now living in Georgia. How do I know this? 'Cause he updates his FB page. He'd be much too lazy to let everyone know where he is otherwise.

I know that FB has mutated in many ways, and has tons of games and spam and status BS, but here's the thing—the core functionality is still there, and nobody forces you to get involved in the trivialities and distractions. Moreover, the layout is forcibly clean, so you don't get room spins and headaches trying to get info from a page, as you did with MySpace.

It's a useful tool. If you let it become more than that, whose fault might that be? Facebook's? Or yours?