This is your grandmother’s online pastime. • And your mother’s, father’s, sons’ and daughters’. Your teacher’s, boss’s and even your pastor’s, too. • And it might as well, or might even, be your butcher’s, baker’s and candle-stick maker’s. • Welcome to Facebook, as it’s said in this virtual world where six degrees of separation can be an understatement and seemingly everyone knows everyone else’s business.
Gone are the days when only “college kids” used any of the free Web sites most popular in the world more generically known as social networking.
Now, one visit to www.facebook.com, arguably the most popular free site of all, turns up all kinds of people, from Harley-riding, boutique-owning grandmas to teens and tweens with approximately 763 friends apiece whose most pressing, and often-posted, question is whose house to hang at this weekend.
Yes, Facebook, and its relatives, have come a long way in quite a short time.
But Facebook especially.
The site, at one time open only to anyone with a valid college or university e-mail address, has grown into nothing short of a cultural phenomenon. People of virtually all ages – we found local users from ages 10 to 89 – use it to keep in touch with family or friends, professionally network, tout a business (perhaps their own) or show off their homes, children, vacations, whatever, through a host of digital photographs.
In what’s called the “Scranton, Pa.” network, which includes Wilkes-Barre and all its surrounds, most people would be hard-pressed to say they don’t know somebody active on the site.
“A few years ago, a friend at King’s College mentioned it, but at the time it was popular yet restricted to colleges, universities and employees of large corporations,” 37-year-old Leonard Piazza of Wilkes-Barre said of Facebook. “When it became available to the general public, I jumped on then.”
Piazza, director of Luzerne County’s Bureau of Elections, is far from alone.
The site opened to the public in 2006 and now has more than 120 million active users.
Individual pages showcase photos of the user, if he or she chooses to post one, as well as information about careers, interests, religious preferences, political affiliations, basically anything a user wishes to reveal. Additionally, users can join an infinite number of interest groups, from wacky and offbeat to stone-serious, meet new friends or connect with old ones by sending and receiving both private and public messages.
Keeping tabs
Facebook became popular when Wilkes-Barre native Jody Humphrey was attending school at Luzerne County Community College.
Years later, the 24-year-old, now living in Boulder, Co., said he checks the site several times a day, whenever he’s “bored,” and notes that his favorite feature is what he calls the “stalker feeds.”
Mini feeds, the official Facebook title, are a series of messages that tell you what your Facebook friends have been up to. And by “friends,” we don’t mean intimate acquaintances who’d do anything for you at any time. In this particular world, a “friend” can be someone you met once 15 years ago or maybe not at all but who can still access, if you allow it, your personal information.
One friend might have added new photographs to his page. (Popular are pictures of spouses, children and trips, but what-I-did-last night is another genre.)
Another friend might have switched status from “in a relationship” to “single,” which may or may not aid a user in employing Facebook as an alternative dating site.
Still another might write a status update to let others know where he or she will spend happy hour on a given evening.
“Facebook is a social utility for any age,” said Malorie Lucich, a Facebook spokeswoman. “Since we extended registration to anyone with a valid e-mail in September 2006, we’ve seen rapid growth outside of college and from around the world.”
Through the ages
Lucich said the 30-and-older population grew by 200 percent in 2008 and that about one third of people on Facebook are over age 30 (not to mention that they make up the fastest-growing demographic on the site).
Erin McLaughlin Griffin fits that demographic.
The 33-year old creative director at Mericle Construction in Wilkes-Barre never thought about logging on before an old friend living in New York City invited her to join.
“I thought it was a joke. It wasn’t,” she said. “I believed it was a site for teens and college kids.”
She registered and created a profile page to keep in touch with her friend and slowly but surely ended up adding other friends as well. Last we checked, she had 122.
McLaughlin Griffin admits that in fact Facebook might just be a “giant waste of time in many respects” and really feed into her bouts with procrastination, but she says the ability to keep in touch makes up for the time lost.
Piazza would back that up.
“It’s kind of like MySpace ‘for the rest of us’ (to borrow a phrase from Steve Jobs at Apple),” he said. “I think Facebook can, and probably will, eventually take out LinkedIn as the most popular networking site,” he said.
LinkedIn is another hugely popular social-networking site but has a far more corporate/professional than lighthearted bent.
LinkedIn is also far less likely to span the age spectrum and include children as well as grandparents. With such a range of ages, sites such as Facebook also keep the generations interconnected.
Ann Fasciana of Moosic Lake is on the site, and so is her college-age daughter, Ayla, who announced one day, “Mom, all my friends are friends with you!”
The elder Fasciana, a 48-year-old grandmother of three, said she likes keeping in touch with Ayla’s friends as well as her own, and Facebook is the best way to do so.
“Of course this is the new thing, the Facebook,” she said.
Fasciana originally planned to use the site to better market her store, All That Boutique in Jessup, but found personal use just as fun.
A new way to do invites
Meanwhile, Piazza’s friend list includes classmates from Wyoming Valley West High School, his brother and sister, current friends and business associates.
With so many people connected to him, he and his network can save a lot of time when trying to organize something as challenging as, say, a class reunion.
“A Facebook Event is one example of a smart way to use Facebook for high-school or college classes like mine to plan a reunion while easily reaching a wide number of people in a relatively short period of time,” Piazza said, explaining a feature that allows users to send out event invitations to friends.
Others have created individual groups on Facebook specifically dedicated to reunion or other get-together planning, and those who sign up can not only commit to coming but bounce location, menu and theme ideas off one another.
John Dawe, marketing manager at Solid Cactus and president of Dawe Consulting Services, said that’s the feature he likes best about Facebook as well.
He spends the majority of his Facebook time coordinating events and get-togethers with co-workers, from happy hours to business gatherings.
“Events are a great way to promote your business,” he said.
Facebook also is a great way for him to keep in touch with old friends such as his high school class from Lake-Lehman. He’s probably “friends” with 80-100 former classmates, he said.
“The whole thing with class reunions is to get together and connect with them, but I’m watching people’s lives go by on Facebook every day,” he said.
How much time does he spend on the site? 10 minutes a day? Maybe 20?
Nope. It’s more like “every hour, minute, second!” he said.
But don’t think he has nothing better to do. As a technologist well-versed in the social-networking world, he, like Piazza, is constantly connected to his social and professional networking sites.
Facebook isn’t the only site he uses daily.
Twitter, where he can post updates about where he is or where a big concert might be taking place, and LinkedIn, a site more geared toward professionals, are two of his others.
With Twitter, a person can join a network, which serves as a good way to promote activities and events, he said, but, “it hasn’t really made its way to the mainstream like Facebook did.”
LinkedIn, however, has been popular for career-minded people since it was launched in 2003.
“You don’t join LinkedIn without your career in mind,” Dawe said of the site, where he’s able to connect with friends who are experts in different professional fields, making it a bit different from his Facebook world.
Facebook “allows you to connect on a personal or professional level,” he said.
For instance, Piazza is able to view photos of his niece, Madison, who lives out of the area, and he plans to post pictures of himself and friends in the future.
“It also seems to be growing at a rapid pace with tools like ‘People You Might Know,’ a feature that scans friends of friends and suggests you might want to add them,” Piazza said. “It has a snowballing effect, and that’s pretty neat.”
So many friends, so little time
For those who wonder how people collect so many friends, Facebook is whiz-bang at sending them to you. Whether the site itself is scanning profile key words or a particular user’s friends simply suggest friends for someone else, connections can and do grow fairly rapidly.
“Apparently it’s very big in the more-metro areas, and more and more people my age seem to be joining,” McLaughlin Griffin, of Mericle, said.
One difference between Griffin’s and Piazza’s generations, as opposed to the younger (high school and college-age) people on the site, is that they generally wouldn’t “friend” someone they didn’t know.
“I don’t understand this. It seems to be big with younger people, who think if they even slightly recognize a name or face, they should be your ‘friend,’ Griffin said. “I only ask to be friends with people who I genuinely care to know more about.”
Dawe, of Solid Cactus, agrees.
“I think the younger crowd may use it as a tool to impress others by getting a ton of irrelevant connections,” he said.
It’s like a game for the younger generation, Humphrey said, joking they might try to get “10 billion friends” to prove their coolness.
Not the case for him, considering he uses Facebook merely to check up on old pals from the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton area and catch up on their lives.
Users can decide whether to make their profile public, meaning anyone within their network can see their profile, or private, meaning only those the user confirms as a friend has access.
Words to the wise
King’s College professor of mass communications Dr. Jayne Klenner-Moore can be found on the site, and she offers some practical, if cautionary, advice for users:
Don’t relay too much information because employers, college administrators and others are constantly checking to see what kind of content is posted.
That shouldn’t deter people from using the site, though, as long as they use it responsibly, she said.
“It’s fast, it’s easy, and it’s very visual,” Klenner-Moore said.
It’s also probably one of the catchiest “in” things since, maybe, Ugg boots, piquing more and more curiosities daily.
Take it from Ann Fasciana, who also has a computer-savvy 11-year-old grandson, Taylor, wondering what the fuss is about.
“He’s asking already,” she said.
