If you are a Facebook user, much of what I have written below is already familiar to you.  What might be of interest comes further down.  Still, you might enjoy a laugh by reading my feeble attempt in trying to explain Facebook.

 

A short time ago, I created a Facebook account for Late Night Musings.  If you aren't aware of Facebook, it is a web site where you can create an account and add friends who also have an account.  Once you do, as they add an entry on their Facebook, which can be of anything they wish, that entry is shown on your Facebook home page.  In a similar fashion, any entry you add on your home page is shown on your friend's home page.  There are also features such as games, canned remarks and other things I haven't explored.

 

Anyway, my intent in creating the Late Night Musings account was quite simple.  I thought in that way I could connect with a few family members and friends, including my high school classmates, and see keep them up to date each time I publish a new musing (www.latenightmusings.com).  It would also allow me to stay up with things they were thinking and doing.  As you might expect, I found Facebook accounts for a few of my classmates and have added them as friends.  Sounds simple enough, doesn't it?  Not quite.

 

There is one feature that I haven't mentioned yet.  It is a way to facilitate finding and adding friends.  The site makes an assumption that you may know others who are friends with a friend you just added.  With them you only need to click on the name of those "friends of friends" to add them.  In adding any friend, the connection doesn't take place until the one you are trying to add as a friend agrees to be added.  As you might expect, many don't but some do.  Now having added those friends, you again are presented with a list of these "friends of friends of friends".  In some ways, it sounds like a pyramid scheme without the exchange of money.

 

Many people don't mind being added to a stranger's list of friends since that means your name is added to theirs as well.  For someone who relishes the idea of having a list of "friends" that numbers in the hundreds, if not thousands, this is a neat feature.  That led me to think of the theory of "six degrees of separation" that many people associate with Kevin Bacon.  If you don't know what it is you can look it up on your search engine.

 

If you are persistent enough and are willing to have your Facebook inundated with innocuous updates from these stranger/friends as opposed to your real friends, you will find many who are willing to let you add them so long as they can add you to their list of friends.  In this way you can claim at a cocktail party that you have too many friends to even count.  Of course these are friends that you never have met and who really don't know you.

 

Maybe that is the new definition of a friend in this brave new world of the internet. Be that as it may, I will remain on Facebook because every now and then I am sent something meaningful and perhaps my "friends" might like to read my musings such as this one.  Anyway, I am thinking if I keep adding friends of friends, sooner or later I'll have Oprah listed as one of my friends - thank you Kevin Bacon.  Isn't technology wonderful?