Facebook overload

Let me know if this sounds like your experience with facebook.com..

I received an email from an aquaintence a few months ago inviting me to join facebook.com and connect as a friend in their profile. I'm open to these social networking sites, so I accepted.

Then after a while, I started receiving emails from others, inviting me to connect to them as friends. Each time I would accept. I didn't do anything with my facebook profile other than accept friend requests. Oh, I did upload a profile picture.

Slowly the frequency of these friend requests increased, until I was receiving several a week. I now have 98-some-odd friends (and I KNOW that some of you have WAY more than that!)

I also have about 35 other requests, which I don't fully understand, things like "so-and-so wants to give you a plant". WHAT? How does one receive a plant over the internet?? I've been "photo-tagged", invited to join groups, do look-alike analysis, and guage my level at several activities.



I'll admit, I'm a little lost by it all..



Which explains how I have committed several facebook faux pas. For one, I left a message on a friends "wall". She later wrote back appologizing that she had to delete it, but she didn't want the world to read it. Little did I know that her "wall" is publicly viewable, and not just viewable, but posted to every one of her friends' walls too!



WHATTH????



Shouldn't I get a warning or something? Is there a "facebook for dummies" I can read? I feel like my Dad! A total technological disaster.

And here's where the "overload" comes in. Now that 98 count 'em 98 of my closest friends are linked to me in facebook, every single thing that goes on in their profile, every update, every photo added, comment made, or status change, appears on my wall. I did a test the other day, and opened my facebook profile. I simply sat on my profile home page hitting the F5 button. For those of you that don't know, F5 refreshes the browser so you get the latest content. My wall changed about every 15-30 seconds!!

Where I used to think of my friends occassionally and wonder how they are doing, I now know way more than ever desired about the whole lot of them. Apparently the norm now is to do something, and then immediately write on facebook about it.. To give a funny example, one of my friends (nameless to protect the guilty), posted a status change that said, and I quote, "so-and-so is enjoying an extra hour of sleep from the change to standard time". To which I commented "How could that be if she is updating her facebook account??".


I may offend people with this post but I'm just saying that for me, it's overload. I think I liked it better when I wasn't so well connected. And yeah yeah I know, it's my decision to have a facebook account, blah blah. I'm just saying......