By Emily Ford
eford@salisburypost.com
I joined a social networking Web site so I could see photos that a friend was holding hostage on her page.
If I wanted to see her pictures, Jen said, then I had to join Facebook.
So, with some trepidation, I signed up, insisting that my page would consist only of the most basic, boring information, and I would not partake in any messaging, chatting, posting, peanut throwing or other shenanigans.
Jen just smiled.
Within a few days of joining, I’d been searched, found, added, confirmed, tagged, requested, notified, bumper stickered, flaired and poked.
I was hooked.
The speed with which coworkers, friends, sorority sisters and even childhood schoolmates located me was astonishing. Facebook suggests people you might know and offers a “friend finder.”
You can also just type in a name and see what comes up. Some call it “Facebook stalking” ó searching the Web site for an old friend, acquaintance or love, then “friending” them so you can see their page.
You can communicate with your friends on a public message board called the “wall” or with private messages and instant chats. You can personalize your page with photos, quizzes, links to videos and articles, cyber games and much more.
So much more that I’m still pretty clueless about how the whole thing works. While many high school and college kids now “facebook” each other instead of sending an e-mail (that’s so 2003), my over-30 crowd is still slightly mystified.
But we are figuring it out.
You can buy each other a virtual beer, add buttons to a virtual bulletin board and display virtual gifts on your page.
I’m regularly offered a “patch of earth” and various flowers to plant in it, all of which I decline. The “Lil Green Patch” apparently is an effort to help fight global warming, but I can’t even keep my own houseplants alive, much less tend to a virtual garden.
My favorite feature on Facebook is the simplest one.
“Status” gives you a quick update about where your friends are, what they’re up to or how they’re feeling. It’s like making 50 phone calls at one time.
Lately, many status reports from my friends involve sleep deprivation caused by either excessive Olympic-watching or preparing to send kids off to college.
Katie Scarvey has the best status updates, including “Katie Scarvey likes the word ‘doldrums,’ but the state, not so much.”
One friend admits that he uses his Facebook page as a distraction during long conference calls. He calls it “multitasking.”
I friended Paul, the boy who lived next door to me when I was 11 years old. We reminisced about the time a mother duck somehow got cornered in his garage, protecting her ducklings from Paul’s seven cats.
Paul ran over to my house and yelled for my dad, who grabbed a fishing net and caught the duck just as she took flight. My sisters scooped up the ducklings in a box, and everyone jumped in the Subaru to release the fowl family at the river.
I never would have guessed that I would relive the infamous 1982 Duck Saga on a social Web site created in 2004 for Harvard University students.
Jen is still smiling.