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My 'Friends,' I Am Alone No Longer

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By STEVE OTTO

sotto@tampatrib.com

Published: February 20, 2009

It's just wonderful.

Every day now I get up, go to work, turn on my computer and there they are, just waiting to be my friends.

Today it was Kim and Kathy and George and Ray and Rachel. All of them wanted to be my friends, share our lives and maybe even our most intimate secrets.

You know, when I was growing up, having friends wasn't always that easy, especially if you were like me, a military brat who moved from town to town every two or three years. It was really difficult coming up with a "best friend" to whom you could confide all those desperately important secrets that young people have.

And when you work down here at the Type and Gripe factory it's not that easy to have friends either. Most of us have lots of pets instead. You meet people and they keep looking at you, wondering if their names are going to show up the next day in print and they'll be left embarrassed forever.

But then a few months ago I signed up to join Facebook. It's one of those online networking things where people can join for free and then enter as much information about themselves as they want.

Getting The Real Snoop

I didn't put in any information. I only joined to get a column and maybe snoop a little into my three sons' Facebook pages to see what they were doing with their lives. Apparently everyone on the planet younger than 30 belongs and for peeping columnists this thing is a key into another world.

I mean, it is amazing what people will put on these things, as if the entire world couldn't peer into their lives online.

Actually I forgot about Facebook, and even my secret password, until a couple of weeks ago when I ran into someone who was miffed that I hadn't responded to his inquiries on the computer asking to be my friend. That's the way it works. You check your e-mail and there will be this request from "Mike" or "Donna" asking you to confirm that you want to be friends.

You go to your page and there they are, with a picture and some information about themselves.

Waiting For Paris To Confirm

Well, I wanted to be friendly, and becoming friends doesn't seem to commit you to anything legal, so I "confirmed" the guy and that opened the floodgates. It turns out that there are people older than 30, people that you would suspect have real lives to live, who are wired into this thing. Pretty soon I'm hearing from politicians and people with weird causes, all wanting to be my friend.

What's even creepier is that you get messages from people you've never heard of, and whom I'm not sure have heard of you, who want to be your friend. They don't mind sending all sorts of information about themselves, including a list of other people who are their friends.

And there is this odd thing called the "wall." Apparently people write on the "wall" by the hour, letting the world know what they are eating or that they are leaving the house to go to the store.

Apparently there are people who have thousands of friends. I already know more people than I have ever met and I'm pretty sure I don't want to meet some of these ephemeral characters in real life. Don't count on any Christmas cards, either.

Keyword: Otto Graphs, for more of Steve Otto's musings.

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