Facebook mystery, what’s it for?

During lunchtime today my son, who is of course of a different generation, suggested I join Facebook.

It was a bit of a, “if you like Blogger you will like Facebook” type of recommendation, anyway I have had a go at this.

It’s all a bit strange and seems to based around something called a “friend” initially much of it seems to be about asking people if they want to be your friend and they asking you if you want to be their friend.

I sense that the term “friend” has a different meaning to what it has in ordinary life and that in some cases it may even mean what enemy means in the real world.

Asking what Facebook actually does has met with more reactions than explanations so far.

Asking people, some of whom you don’t know and some of whom you do, to “be friends” with you, is somehow reminiscent of the first day at a new school.

And then there is the business of those people, some of whom you don’t know and some of whom you do, asking “be friends with me” well at the moment I shall just say yes and see what happens.

Messages are appearing on my Facebook page, along the lines of “Gordon Brown and Tony Blair are now friends” and I am wondering if this information should interest me in some way.

There is also the peculiar dimension of security settings, this seems to be about putting information on the internet that you don’t want people to see and then adjusting the settings so that people can’t see it.

Blogger I can just about manage, Twitter I just couldn’t get on with, I have formed an impression, which may be wrong, that it has something to do with mobile phones, something that I tend to dissolve.

I think my Facebook url is http://www.facebook.com/michaelsbookshop and I am going to try and master how to use it.

During my childhood I often got the feeling that there was some secret that everyone else knew about, but I didn’t, I suppose at the time I must have wanted to know what that secret was. Well Facebook is evidently such a secret and I suppose I am now old enough to know that I may not wish to discover what it is.