Being on Facebook is like volunteering to receive spam, and the more successful you are at finding friends, the more spam you get! In the end, Facebook is really the emptiest, loneliest place on the whole World Wide Web. It’s all static and white noise, and the steady streams of status updates start to look like ASDF, ASDF, ASDF after a while.

As for “meeting” you on the Internet, yes, indeed, we met on MySpace. Without social networking Internet tools, I wouldn’t have met Hank, Ebonmuse, Mike Pucinella and many of the other people who are part of this community and my life would have been relatively impoverished.

As good as it is to share this website with all of you “virtual friends,” I look forward when we can all converse face to face, somewhere in the world. Tim Hogan keeps insisting that a face-to-face meeting of DI people should occur in Australia and that Hank should host it.

Yet you’ve stayed off the Facebook bandwagon. If Facebook retains its popularity and increasing age demographic, though, you may find that you simply must join it. Facebook really does serve as a great repository of friends’ photos, their life news,and their brief moments of celebration and whimsy (via status updates). It’s also a hub of infinite creepdom. But since every Facebook account holder engages in some degree of their own “Facebook stalking”, the benefits and drawback somehow cancel one another out.

Actually, every self-identified introvert should revel in social networking sites like Facebook. It lets you cultivate and maintain connections without the fuss of going before people. It allows those of us who like “alone time” to simultaneously enjoy our solitude and maintain the level of contact that whiny extroverts require.

1. I Only Friend People I Really Know.

2. Facebook Made Me Do It.

3. Wall-to-Wall Flirting Isn’t Cheating.

4. I Use Facebook to Keep in Touch With People.

5. I’m Soooo Over Facebook.

6. And I am Soooo Not Competitive.

7. Facebook is My Friend.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/185641