This Facebook thing

There’s something ominous about the sheer momentum of facebook. I’ve never seen an internet phenomenon affect this many people before, and, at least momentarily, really affect their lives. I’ve been on for just a few months and it seems if anything the rate at which I’m seeing people who I never thought I’d hear from again join up and find me is accelerating. When is this going to stop? Is there going to come a time a year or three hence when we’re all, “facebook, remember that? what happened to that thing?” or is it going to change things, like the Web before and after Google, or for that matter, the Internet before and after the Web? (Or more cynically, the Internet before and after the September That Never Ended?)

Will I soon get a facebook friending from Eddie Bresnahan, my best friend who lived next door to me in LaGrange, Illinois, and whom I last saw when I was five, sometime before my family moved to Michigan in 1975?  About whom the only clear thing I remember is that his family owned a Gnip Gnop?

How about Timmy Bolt, who acted up in Kindergarten at the Lutheran school I went to in LaGrange, because his mom was the teacher (and that’s the only thing I remember about him except a vague impression of his appearance)?

How about the little girl named Katie that my mom babysat when I was about four?  How about Becky, the daughter of my mom’s best friend in LaGrange, whom we lost touch with when we moved?

None of the above would surprise me at this point.  I’m expecting friend requests from previous incarnations soon.