[ I resisted for a while, but after spending more than an hour reading friends’ “25 things” on Facebook, I’m sold, and feel obligated to contribute to the meme - Adam ]

1. I had never seen snow coming from the sky ‘til college (grew up in S. California, went to school in the midwest).
2. I have not eaten fast food in a decade, except for In’N'Out and (rarely) Subway.
3. I started studying music at age four, wrote my first song around age six, and have always had perfect pitch (which is both a blessing and a curse).
4. I began e-mailing in 1987, before there was a public internet (on Prodigy Online Services) and was (I’m embarrassed to admit this) a forum leader on AOL in the early 90’s so I could avoid the high per-hour charges.
    
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   - Blathered by Adam on Saturday, January 31, 2009 at 19:14 Permalink
   - Filed under personal
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I have over 500 Facebook friends.  That’s a statement to help you understand my predicament, not a badge of honor.  Of these, a handful are close friends, a big bunch are “regular” friends, a ton of ‘em are colleagues with which I have varying degrees of social contact and interest, and an even larger ton are “acquaintances or less.”  From that latter category, I still value many of those admittedly “weak ties.”  I may not know someone well, but perhaps she and I connected strongly even after just a brief meetup.  Or… maybe I don’t chat with that one fellow much anymore, but he used to be my best friend in high school and I still care about how he’s doing.

But then there are the other “friends.”  People I met once at a conference and exchanged pleasant pleasantries with.  Someone from college who was the girlfriend of an acquaintance.  Or someone who… uh… who is that guy?

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The biggest and most painful flaw in Facebook’s friend-system is that it assumes that two people in a “friendship” see the relationship in the same way… and thus have the same interests (or interest level) in both sharing and learning about each other.  I have no doubt that there are people I’m interested in hearing about (and from), but who absolutely couldn’t give a rodent’s posterior about my latest blatherings or photos.  On a related note, I have work buddies that I enjoy chatting with, but would probably not to subject them to my occasional angst, drinking photos, dating whines, and so on.  As a friend of mine once commented, “You don’t want to see your boss in Speedos” or, more intellectually, many people understandably feel uncomfortable sharing or reading “out of social context.” You get my point.