Facebook

Three days ago I had never heard of 'Facebook.' Of course, one hears about these sort of social networking websites in the news and such. I'd heard of Bebo and MySpace, but never this Facebook thing.

I flicked on the computer and an email came through from my cousin Claire. Claire is cool. I am not. Claire has "invited me to be her friend." Who am I to refuse? So, I diligently clicked on the link in the email. It was all a bit confusing, but I remained committed and eventually filled out my name, where I lived, my relationship status (clearly I'm not the target audience) and I even uploaded a photo (which, of course, included Anna). And then it was over. Claire was my friend. I was Claire's friend. I thought something might happen, but it didn't. Somehow, I just had another little profile up on the world wide web. World wide.

To my genuine surprise, I received another email the next day from a good friend who I haven't spoken with in ages. It really couldn't have been more random for me. She, too, had invited me to be her friend. Suddenly I have two friends! Motivated by the landslide of random affection coming my way, I put in some more information on myself (cue marketing people salivating at my predictable behaviour). Again, having done that, I was struck by the void it left. I went back once or twice to confirm that everything I had put in was, in fact, still as I had left it. It was.

Only hours later, my younger brother Thomas has emailed inviting me to "be his friend." Of course, this offer was too much to turn down... only somehow I managed to mess it up and I couldn't accept his kind offer of e-friendship. So, I clumsily found my way around the site a bit more and clicked on some link that asked Thomas to be my friend. Fingers crossed!

I'm now both suspicious and deeply intrigued. One, what kind of online viral thing is this that I can be asked 3 times in two days to be peoples' friends? And, from such a random assortment of people I know: it was time to do some serious research on what kind of website I was dealing with.

With both Claire and Thomas in the mix, I was suspicious that Facebook was cool (Jen is cool too, but she is more my age!). I needed a group of people who knew cool to see if they were involved. Field Hockey. A quick search revealed that Jenny, Jenn, Jube, Hilary, and Kaitlin (and surely loads more) were all on this Facebook thing. My gut reaction was "Oh God, get off. You don't belong." And I probably should heed this feeling... but I'm now so intrigued by it. Not only that, I only have two friends! Jenny has 136 friends. I surely have 10! As soon as Tom accepts me as his friend, I'm up to 3. But really, Claire and Tom are family, so I am not sure they count. So, let the campaign begin to get Ben 10 non-family friends on Facebook!