I have spent a little time on Facebook these holidays and have added some old friends as well as a couple of new ones. It’s great to find people I know and after the discussion I had earlier in the week, think I might use these tools to stay in touch with friends as the younger lot are.

When you are in your 40s though, many of your friends are not on Facebook, or any other social networks that I can find. Yesterday I called an old friend who I haven’t seen for around 4 years. I have a small pile of his stuff that I have uncovered in this cleaning frenzy I’ve been in. I am dropping it off to him today whilst I am in Melbourne. I have attempted to find him on Facebook. Somehow I had lost his details. Possibly a dysfunctional mobile phone that I’d been using at the time. Fortunately I found a piece of paper with his details on it. The whole experience made me realise how easy it is to lose track of friends. We all have busy lives.

Facebook has had some negative press, as have many other social networking sites. It all comes back to the individual user though really. If you are in it to get the largest number of friends or making all your details open to the public, you could encounter an invasion of privacy. I would argue it is one that you have invited.

I was chatting to my son’s friend Brigitte on the way to the deb the other night. She is completing her VCE in a town that is over 3 hours away from here. She moved when she was in year 8. They (son and friend) caught up online. They weren’t close friends when she lived here. She is a year older than he. They reconnected on My Space and are very close friends now. Brig stays here for weekends and he has been to her new place for weekends as well. Her extended family lives here still.
I chatting with Brig about staying in contact with people when she finishes school. I remembered when I finished HSC (as it was known, back in the day) that I lost touch with mobs of people that I had seen every day at school for around 12 years. It was weird. They weren’t close friends, but I liked many of the kids and never really saw most of them again. I told her to appreciate all those acquaintance-type people.
Living in a country town, many people move away when they finish school. When I caught up with lots of them at our 20 year school reunion, they were mostly the same as they were at school. It was fun.
Anyway Brig and I were wondering if kids today will stay in touch better with MSN and the Internet. She is going to be an experiment for me and let me know if it happens.