10 lessons from my 10 weeks on Facebook

I've been actively engaged on Facebook for about 10 weeks now - long enough to get the hang
and long enough to learn something new about myself, about social media, and about the ever-growing need for people to connect.

So, onto the list - 10 lessons I've learned from my 10 weeks on Facebook.

Lesson #1 - I was not as invisible in high school or college as I had previously assumed. In fact, some people who I barely remember actually recall me with great clarity. And post pictures of me from the 1970s and 80s that I've never even seen.

Lesson #2 - Sometimes when I get a new friend request, it takes all my powers of concentration to pinpoint where I know them from. Was it the town that I moved away from when I was 14? Was she a colleague at the Children's Television Workshop where I toiled as a secretary in my first real job out of college - or was he the boyfriend of the reporter I worked with at that weekly paper in Brooklyn in the 90s? All that compartmentalization I've done over the years is useless in the face of a melting pot technology like FB. I feel like the person in the Verizon commercial being followed around by the entire network - only it's my own time-space continuum of people from every era of my life.

Lesson #3 - Some people will friend you, but then pretty much want to be left alone. And sometimes I feel much the same. One of the unsung joys of FB for me is being able to be part of someone's life without ever having to really talk to them - and I mean that in a healthy, non-stalking kind of way. I can't possibly hang out with all 100+ of my FB friends - even if they did live nearby. But I can note, with surprise and delight, that my cousin took a spiritual meditation trip to India and enjoy all the pictures that he and his friends posted near the Taj Mahal. The FB connection means I'm able to be part of his life in a way I never have been in the past - so that when we do see each other at the next family function, it won't feel like it's been years since we''ve connected.

Lesson #4 - It has allowed me to fill in the blanks in my life - holes I hadn't even known existed. I can view, for instance, the grade school pictures of awkward pre-teen boys and girls who grew into the cheerleaders and the jocks and the popular kids that I first met when I moved to town, and feel empathy for them. And I can ask the friend I left behind when I moved to that new town the burning question I've always wanted to ask - "Did you date my first boyfriend after I left?" And discover that (as I suspected) indeed she did, bringing some cathartic closure to an emotionally wrought period in my life.

Lesson #5 - Friends are fickle creatures. It's hard to pinpoint which comments, posts, or notes will strike a nerve and elicit a response (and from whom). An elaborate photo shoot of my daughters' 300+ stuffed animal collection that took hours to organize barely registered. But a handwritten note one of my 8-year-olds wrote to the tooth fairy when she neglected to acknowledge a tooth under her pillow went viral.

Lesson #6 - It is a small world after all. Turns out not one, but two of my friends know two of my other friends for reasons having nothing to do with me. The mother I met in the waiting room of Columbia Presbyterian as both of our babies underwent open heart surgery in 2000 is apparently best friends with the friend of a college buddy.

Lesson #7 - Not all of my friends appreciate (or even recognize) my sense of humor. When I changed my relationship status to "it's complicated" on a lark, just to get my husband's reaction, I was deluged with concerned emails from friends and family worrying about the state of my marriage - forcing me into a public declaration of marital bliss (and a private exhortation to myself to never overestimate the ability of my humor to translate to the written word).

Lesson #8 - I'm breaking no new ground by saying this, but yes - social networking is addicting. I check my email and FB first thing when I wake up in the morning, and last thing before I lay down at night. It's gotten so bad that when my daughter pads out into the living room early on a weekday and sees me at the computer, she says - "You're on Facebook, right?" And I must sheepishly nod my head, before ignoring her completely to check my status updates.

Lesson #9 - I learn things on FB that I wouldn't find out anywhere else. I can't remember any of them right now so they're not life-changing epiphanies, but I have come to rely on certain friends to filter the news for me and post items that end up enriching my life (or at least give me a laugh).

Lesson #10 - For some people, Facebook isn't enough. After reconnecting with everyone in the past 30 years that they've ever met, searching through their contacts' photos, and reading a few weeks of their updates about watching the latest episode of ER, they crave something more immediate, more meaningful, more relevant.

Enter Twitter. I've only got about two weeks worth of experience in this new communications medium, but here's my early laymen's take. Twitter is a third world wire service on steroids, without filters or editors, and besotted with news about itself. Its millions of reporters struggle to make their stories heard above the din, and in the process earn themselves a loyal following. Amateur ham radio operators also chime in from time to time about their pet lizards, and nuggets of brilliance occasionally emerge from the ooze, but it's mostly unpolished and unverifiable and often uninteresting.

Still, it's got an immediacy and naturalness and urgent wry humor that's seductive and makes me want to learn more.

Expect a full report in 8 weeks.

Stop the social media whirl, I want to get off

I'm not an early adopter of anything, never have been.

Didn't own my first pair of button-front Levi's til I was in college. Was certain rap music was a fad that would quickly die out with Devo. Regarded sushi as completely unappetizing until, well, until I got up the nerve in the late-90s to actually try it. And then only ate California rolls for two years.

You get the picture.

Yet somehow I've gotten sucked into at least wanting to join the dizzying din of Twitter and Facebook and whatever else some young MIT drop-outs are cooking up in their garages.

Problem is - I'm not very good at it. My Facebook status updates elicit yawns (unheard, but deeply felt my friends), my tweets seem to disappear into the void (if a twitterer tweets and no one retweets or responds, does it really exist?) and texting only works for me because no one expects me to be witty or charming - just specific. "On 6:02 to Hewlett. c u soon" may not be Haiku, but it gets the job done.

The thing about FB and Twitter is that we all yearn to be relevant and funny and retweeted, and followed on fridays. But I imagine many out there feel like I do when no one follows me on Friday - like the kid picked last for the team in gym, or the 12-year-old girl running aimlessly back and forth across the lawn during the kissing party because no one wants to catch and kiss her.

In a way, Twitter reminds me of the wire service, UPI, where I worked in the 1990s, before email and the Web. We had an email-type service between bureaus and it was great fun to instantly communicate with bureaus in London and D.C.

And whenever news broke, we all saw it instantly stream across our terminals in Twitter-like bulletin format if it was a really big, A-wire (national) story like the Oklahoma City bombing.

I remember how cool I felt knowing the news before anyone else did - before the all-news radio stations, before TV, and at least a day before the newspapers.

While much of the chatter on Twitter is about Twitter itself and social media in general, a lot of it is also about being the first to share a link to a story that no one else has read about yet. Or posting a picture that no one else has seen. And becoming the cool kid with 100 more followers because of it.

At UPI, we were all the cool kids (especially the guy who constantly listened to the police scanner), and I felt smug in the knowledge as I headed home that I knew exactly what was going to be on the local news that night - many times because I'd written it.

But then I got into trade magazines when UPI stopped paying my expense checks and contemplated a 5th bankruptcy, and then into marketing when I got sick of trade magazines and poverty.

And so now, here I am, the head of marketing for a professional services firm, the mother of twins who enjoy texting their cousin on my phone and exhort me to stop spending so much time on Facebook, and a near-total Twitter failure.

Maybe I haven't given it enough time. Maybe I just haven't found my true niche of former reporters turned trade magazine editors turned mothers of twins who would instantly bond with me and find my separated at birth jon stewart photo juxtaxposed with a Russian art portrait hilarious.

Or maybe, just maybe, I'm not cut out to tweet. Maybe essay writing is my milieu, and I don't need to be like Meet the Press' David Gregory, fishing for a lunch date from Team Obama as he walks near the White House. (Although the Page Six devotee in me gets a strange thrill from being able to eavesdrop in real time on celebrities' most boring or inane thoughts.)

Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it took Tom Robbins 288 pages to write Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (the first book I ever read that I wished I had written.)

"Sissy Henkshaw Gitch" is 20 characters right there, and she hasn't even stuck out her enormous hitchhiking thumb. So I won't feel so bad if my tweets fall flat, or if I end up withdrawing from the Twitterverse altogether.