I first signed up for Facebook a couple of years ago. I don’t remember why, exactly, except that someone was telling me over and over that I needed to get signed up. It was probably my niece, the same way as with MySpace. So I signed up, but I never really got into the habit of logging in, and until a few days ago I never logged in more often than perhaps once every several months or so. I had a total of 4 people on my “friend” list: my niece, two people I knew from playing World of Warcraft, and a single friend from high school.

Anyway, last week I was browsing through some old photos when I decided to break out to check my email. One of my incoming messages was from Classmates.com, the school-alumni site. Classmates is a decent site in some ways but I think they charge too much for their memberships. This particular message happened to come right on the heels of another message that mentioned Facebook, and the combination of events got me wondering how many of my old high school classmates might be lurking around on Facebook.

So that night, I logged in and started doing searches for some names. The first result was a reminder that most names aren’t very unique at all. Even names that seem like they’d be fairly unique can easily be shared by another 20 or 30 people across the country.  And since most Facebook users keep most of their profile information set to be private to people that aren’t in their friend list, it means you can’t always easily figure out who’s who.

Then I figured, maybe the best way to start this off was to let someone else do the work. The one old friend already on my list, Pat Pepper, had been on Facebook awhile, and we’d had a lot of friends in common back in high school. So I went to his profile and started looking through HIS friend list. As I suspected, there were a few familiar names. Next, I looked at the friend lists of THOSE people, and found even more names. Before I knew it, I had a few dozen friend requests sent out. Next, I searched for a few people that used to be co-workers and repeated the whole process. Before the night was out, I’d sent out something like 75 friend requests.

What really surprised me, however, was how quickly I got responses. I was used to something like a friend request taking anywhere from several days to weeks on other websites, but on Facebook I got something like 50 responses within the first 24 hours! Over the next few days, more responses trickled in, and I started getting incoming friend requests from old classmates I’d not yet discovered for myself.

I also heard from a few people that they had sent me friend requests in the past, but that I’d never responded.  That was because I wasn’t logging in at all, I guess.

Facebook Groups

As I was browsing through friend lists, I noticed that there were a fair number of my old high school friends from the Cypress High School Photo Club.  I also noticed that while there were groups for the class of ’81, the class of ’82, and so forth, there was NOT a group for the photo club.  So I created the “CHS Photo Club Alumni” group and started uploading old pictures to the gallery and inviting people to it.  We have 13 members so far.  That’s not bad for the first 5 days.

Old Photos

One thing that’s very popular on Facebook is posting photos taken ”in the good old days”.  Just about anybody who knows me is aware that I have quite a lot of photos from the good old days.  Once I started uploading images to Facebook, I started hearing from school friends asking for more old school pix, old Atari friends asking for more old Atari pix, and so forth.

A few years back, I scanned the majority of my old slides and negatives into the computer.  There’s still a lot that haven’t been scanned, but I’ve probably done something like 85%.  So I’ve been going through the ones from school and work events where I took pictures and finding ones to post.

I’m trying to do just a few images at a time every couple days or so, but I’ve got dozens of good pictures already selected and literally hundreds more good candidates that I haven’t really looked at yet.

What I’ve Learned

This experience has taught me several things so far.  First of all, I note that a much greater percentage of female classmates are on Facebook than male classmates.  However, it can be harder to find them, since they are generally going by their married names.  Facebook does have an “alternate name” feature that can be used to hold a woman’s maiden name, but not everybody uses it.  I find that a lot of women are doing the hyphenation thing or just putting their maiden name in the middle.

The games on Facebook seem to be a very popular attraction.  Two in particular that seem to have caught the eye of many of my classmates are Mafia Wars and Farmtown.  Both games tie into the whole Facebook setup so that you can send items to friends, ask for their help, and otherwise interact with each other.  I’ve been playing both myself, and Mafia Wars in particular has captured my attention.  One of the nice things is that it really only requires a few minutes at a time here and there.  And since I spend a large portion of my day in front of the computer anyway, it’s easy to pop over and play a few turns every now and then.

The Facebook Experience

I don’t know how long Facebook will hold my attention, but for now I’m having fun uploading pictures, commenting on other people’s pictures, and just generally reconnecting with people I’ve not seen in a long while.

I think a lot of people who don’t get the point of Facebook are probably doing exactly what I did at first… they sign up and then they don’t bother trying to hook up with anybody.  Or maybe they just add one or two people.  The result is, with such a small network of friends, whenever they do bother to login, they probably won’t see anything that captures their attention.

Creating a good network is crucial to the Facebook experience.  If you don’t create a network of friends who are active on the site, then you’d be entirely justified in thinking “what’s the point”.  On the other hand, if you do put together a friend list of people who are posting status updates, uploading pictures, playing games, and so forth, and you spend a little time to participate, then Facebook can be an awful lot of fun.  Check it out!