I have “been on” Facebook since the summer of 2007 when, in the process of preparing for a job interview, I started researching Web 2.0 I’ve found new and old friends alike there and I like the applications and games.
However, over the past couple of weeks I have reconnected with some people that I used to consider my friends and truthfully I am not exactly sure how I feel about it.
When I first stumbled across them I was excited. A few of them “friended” me and then, as those of you who use Facebook know, suddenly people that I might know were being recommended left and right. I got caught up in the novelty of seeing where so-and-so was or how you-know-who was doing and I was friending people that I hadn’t seen for ten or fifteen years. (Yes, in Facebookland “friend” is a verb.) It was like a virtual class reunion.
But then like a real-world class reunion, the reasons that I had lost touch with some of the people came flooding back to me. I saw the wedding pictures of a friend from college and when I saw how everyone in our little clique but me was in the picture I remembered a falling-out that I had had with the group. I was happy to find a friend from high school until I recalled how a mutual “friend” of ours liked to remind me how she thought that this friend was so much smarter, prettier, and skinnier than I ever was.
Although I like to think that I don’t hold grudges, I have to admit that I was a tad bitter towards some of my long-lost friends. I seriously wondered what had ever possessed me to seek these people out in the first place.
But then I remembered that I didn’t seek them all out: Albeit virtually, many of them approached me first. Has enough time passed that we can let go of the things that split us apart and reconcile? Or is it nothing more than superficial network building?
The optimist in me hopes it’s the former. The cynic in me suspects it’s the latter.