

Facebook is TIVO for friendships - mark_skaggs
http://markskaggs.com/westwood/facebook-is-tivo-for-friendships/

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yason
Well, after years of resisting, I've concluded that Facebook is good.

I've noticed that Facebook brings another level of granularity to the
intensity of connections to people you used to know, or went to
school/whatever with.

There are people you just wouldn't call up because you don't know them too
well but you still know them. You could send an instant message or email them,
if you had something to say.

Then there are people I would hesitate to bother with an instant message. An
email would probably go since it's asynchronous and doesn't disrupt the other
person that much.

Then there are people with which I would have a certain barrier to even
sending email to. For example, my high school "mates": I would hesitate to
email many of them because I don't know them too well and I didn't really talk
much with them in high school either.

But Facebook solves this. The barrier to ask someone to be your friend is
negligible. The barrier to comment on someone's status is even lower than
that!

Note that this doesn't mean hatching superficial relationships. With some
people I still have nothing much to talk about. But I've noticed that when I
can, via Facebook, adjust to the "correct" intimacy level with someone I
barely talked with. If it's a couple of status comments a year, I'll learn new
things about them. With some of these people I've begun to swap comments
regularly. With some of them I've sent emails or even chatted.

I could say I wish I had known how to get to know some of these people back
then; I think I now have that chance.

This would not have happened without Facebook because there was no such low-
intensity connection before, except for maybe randomly bumping into someone on
the street.

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chrischen
That was exactly what facebook's initial appeal to me was. But then after a I
discovered all those long lost people, we realized there wasn't much to talk
about.

~~~
ntoshev
This is the point of all the status updates, link sharing etc - it's stuff to
talk about. You wouldn't send a link to something you thought is cool to all
your friends, but posting it on your wall is Ok because you are not
interrupting them and they can easily ignore it.

~~~
chrischen
Yes but those long lost people also have friends... closer friends that they
would actually care about reading the status feeds of.

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rms
I'm part of the first class of Facebook. Facebook was widely released during
my first semester of college. I don't know what life would have been like
without Facebook, but for a lot of people my age Facebook has become an
integral part of our social life. For many people my age, it's more than TIVO
for friendships, but I don't have a comparably snappy metaphor.

~~~
chrischen
I'm in college, but I tend to not use it very much.

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sgibat
for my friends and I it's more like a message board to post interesting links
and talk about whatever we normally talk about. I rarely reconnect with old
friends.

edit: but then again, I am only 23.

