It's been a year since I've been on Facebook.
When I started, I was semi-ecstatic to be on it; locating friends, finding new applications to play with, responding to posts, commenting on status messages, reconnecting with people I haven't seen in 20+ years...it was some kind of silly bliss. I felt like some door in my life had opened and I was looking at the past and present all at once.
Then people I worked with were all there and it felt like I was involved in sidebars noone else at work knew about. It was kind of like a private joke, only noone was really walking around laughing with eachother. Then in-laws and other family got in on it and I was learning more about their daily lives and they mine.
It's now become part of my everyday life - I post one to three times a day, check it almost compulsively from my iPhone (they've finally done decent work on the app for it, I must say), and talk about it with my friends at least once a day. The luster of discovering new ways to interact with it has worn off. I find myself on it simply as a way to catch up with everyone now...it's no longer a pretty, glistening toy in my hand.
I'm not sure how I feel about it either. Part of me is happy that I have all these people in my life, and it's nice to see what people are doing and how they are. On the other hand, it's work to catch up - it's like an added responsibility to an already busy existence. Am I going to feel guilty for not posting a status tomorrow? What if someone friend requests me and I don't even check for two or three days? Will that make me look like a callous, Faux Facebooker?
And I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop from their end...will they start charging for "subscriptions"? Will there be ads that start popping up all over the place while I'm responding to a post?
Where do we go from here, Facebook? Don't leave me hanging, or I'm gonna start scanning the web for a new thingamajig. It's not a threat or anything, but I don't know how long I can commit without some kind of blueprint for our future together...
