Facebook is weird.

I am not a huge fan of Facebook. In fact, Facebook is lucky if I log on once a month. Recently, however, I’ve had more people requesting to be my friend and such. People from high school that weren’t even my friends or people I barely talked to suddenly want to be my “friend” on Facebook. Why? So they’ll be able to boast that they have 200+ friends and need little ol’ me to push their friend count higher? Do they have any intention of establishing a meaningful relationship with me? Are they just bored and adding everyone they’ve ever known regardless if they even like that person or not? It all seems a little silly to me.

I usually don’t add people to my friends list on any site unless I know them from somewhere whether it’s real life or an online community like The Quilting Bee. This week though, I’ve added a few new “friends” to my Facebook, all of whom I went to school with at one time or another. Once of which was never really a “friend” of mine. I barely spoke to her the whole time we went to high school together, although we did have a few classes together. I decided to be nice and go ahead and add her (out of curiosity mostly). Last night I spent some time looking through her photos on Facebook, and it was indeed confirmed that she married this guy we went to school with. They dated in high school (and they were sort of this odd couple), and are now married and appear to have a daughter. I felt kind of slimy looking at her photos. It was like I was spying on her life or something. It felt sort of uncomfortable. After it was all over, I felt kind of bad that I had wasted 20 minutes or so of my life that I will never get back.

Let me just add in here that I haven’t really stayed close friends with anyone from high school. I really had no desire or need to. Does that make me an awful person? Were my friends really my friends if I don’t even associate with them now? On the flip side of the creepiness of looking through people’s photos, I did have two girls add me as their friend on Facebook, and it was kind of nice to hear from them and how they remembered good times we had in high school. One congratulated me on my marriage and wanted to know what I’ve been up to for the past 7 years. I just still find the whole concept of Facebook a little bizarre, and it’s kind of a more upscale MySpace in my opinion.

What do you think about Facebook? Do you add everyone you know to your friend list, or do you just add people you are friends with? Do you use Facebook to satisfy your curiosities about people you used to know? Why would someone want to have over 200 “friends” on Facebook if they don’t even know, like, or care about some of them?

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