Hello, I’m Katherine and I’m a fan of Facebook. I don’t know if there is 12-step program for it yet, but one of the steps definitely needs to be something akin to at least the level of psychological release given to plastic surgery patients. Oh come on, don’t tell me you haven’t mined your friends’ “see all” lists for new friends or swelled with pride when your 100th friend confirmed you! What is the appropriate celebration for 200… I guess I’ll know by the time I get there. And what about that uncomfortable cybersilence when someone keeps popping up in the “friends you may know” side bar and you don’t add them. You know, you’re popping up on their Home page too…

How do you define friend, are they a friend of a friend? Have you ever even met them? I actually have one friend who I haven’t got the slightest clue about except for a handful of common friends and he looked interesting. What the hell, I had to get to 100 somehow!

Obviously I went in to it dubiously. I am a self-proclaimed B-boom-Xer, but I wasn’t into yet one more thing to maintain, monitor, publish content to, manipulate my photos for, read, comment on, join, obsess about, and feel the pressure to constantly come up with intriguingly witty ways to describe my current status.

I tried MySpace to hang out with my niece and nephew and it was fun while he was in Iraq, but ultimately lost interest when I didn’t need it to keep in touch. I’ve been in LinkenIn for years, but… yawn. I just didn’t use it for business promotion purposes. It’s definitely a more professionally oriented networking site and that’s fine.

At first I was just really annoyed at the people around me who couldn’t get their heads out of their…. Blackberrys… laughing out loud, furiously typing… whilst attending business functions or pretending to listen to what I was saying. I did a little polling and asked some pointed questions about what the big deal was and got some interesting answers. The primary response circled around a need for connection.

Now that I’m an FBfanatic, I can honestly say that I’m having a blast. I do feel more connected. I’m getting to know people (who were already in my daily life) much better. I’m making new friends and sharing more of myself. I’ve reconnected with people I haven’t talked to in a long time, even globally. And people who I could never scare up an email conversation with are easily staying in touch. I enjoy checking to see who is online, even though I may not engage, it’s nice to know they are there and connected in a like endeavor… it’s like hanging out with comfortable silence. I like catching up on my news feed, laughing out loud, learning cool stuff and expanding all horizons. And I like the big picture community of people who can rise up in protest over a common interest and affect change extremely quickly.

I have always been a connoisseur of pop culture; it’s about time I got on the new party line (wow, who remembers those! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_line_(telephony). Facebook is a great form of self expression and helps pull us back together from high-tech isolation, using the very technology that pulled us apart. Hey, even a goldfish named Swifty can play in the pool. Off to twitter I go!