A couple of weeks ago, when I wrote a post about Facebook and LinkedIn, Paul Lukasiak commented:
These social networking sites are kinda scary to me…
In real life, people move on, make new friends, forget old acquaintences, etc, etc, etc…
Now, for the rest of your life, you will be stuck with that guy you thought was pretty cool when you were a sophomore in high school, but turned out to be kind of a jerk by you junior year, will be part of your life forever. Even if you move to Katmandu, he’s going to be sending you his freaking baby pictures….
Thanks to Facebook, BFF MEANS “forever”, whether you like it or not.
That isn’t the half of it. I’ll let my friend Thomas Crampton explain, in a blog post he put up Friday:
Today I discovered the perils of changing my Facebook profile.
My fiancee and I decided that showing our engagement in Facebook gave out a little too much personal information.
But I did not realize that unchecking the box marked “Thomas Crampton is engaged to Thuy-Tien Tran” would send a message to everyone connected to us in Facebook that “Thomas Crampton and Thuy-Tien Tran are no longer engaged”.
Within minutes an email arrived from a friend in San Francisco asking if I was doing ok and a friend in France posted the news on his Twitter feed … which has nearly 800 readers. Colleagues discussed the situation without me knowing about it. …
Thomas’s blog post about this will of course find its way all over the blogosphere (it hasn’t yet, but I’m doing my part here), at which point thousands and thousands of strangers will know that he and Thuy-Tien Tran are engaged. Which I guess is better than thinking they’ve broken up.