Social Networking

I am a facebook member since 2007. I was living in Shanghai when Facebook suddenly became very popular. One friend after another broke down and joined the fast growing community. At the beginning it seemed to be fantastic to be suddenly able to reconnect non- commitally with all those lost friends, ex-loves and childhood buddies. It was fun to check out your friend`s friends (at the beginning most profiles were open and unprotected - everyone could see everything) and it was even exciting to get friend request from strangers.
It was also cool to show pictures and clips online and post links from my youtube or flickr channel. I got much more feedbacks and clicks from Facebook members than just from the usual platform tourists. So well I guess I thought it was pretty awesome for quite a while. I even got quite a few job offers thanks to Facebook.
Then suddenly one day - when we came back to Europe in 2009 - I realized that I handled it quite careless. Eventhough I never ever posted weird or offensive status updates or pictures and I never shared a lot about my private life I still had much to many strangers in my friends list and to many photos tagged with my name.
So I deleted my account and lived happily without it - for two weeks? Maybe three. I felt so disconnected. I realzized that I have neither an email address nor phone number from most of my Shanghai friends. And even if I had one - email addresses change, so do phone numbers and addresses but you will always find your friends on facebook - even if they change names or countries - you are connected trhough friends and will find them again in friend`s friendslist. So I joined again- now with different name and just adding people I really know and like - or at least not dislike.
I try to keep my friendslist under 300 and never ever post something unless I really have the strong desire to share this.
And it works great. I am seldom using Facebook anymore - at least not actively. I check everyday - but unless something really cool or funny happened I stay calm.