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Fiftysomething, Facebooking, and Fabulous!Last week I had zero friends on Facebook. Now I have 775.

By Emily Yoffe
Posted Friday, March 16, 2007, at 1:30 PM ET
Illustration by Nina Frenkel. Click image to expand.

Writing an article about how I had no friends on Facebook may seem like a shameless ploy to collect hundreds of them. But even though it sounds disingenuous, I assumed maybe a dozen people of Facebook age would read my article from last week, "Facebook for Fiftysomethings," and "friend" me.

But I now have, oh, 775 friends. I have so many friends that Facebook decided I need to do something better with my time than chatting with them and has shut down my ability to communicate. "You have exceeded the limit for sending messages!" Facebook has informed me, halting my efforts to write a note back to everyone who included one to me with their friend request. (I'll get to you if Facebook relents.)

Normally, my social-networking skills are on par with Ted Kaczynski's, but Facebook took care of this for me by algorithm. The best way to make connections on Facebook is to be in a network (most often a college or a geographical region). I discovered when I friended someone in an existing network, that network automatically appeared on my profile page. I now know people in almost 400 networks, from the Washington, D.C., network, where I have 61 new friends, to Columbia University (which I did not attend) with 19, to Freescale Semiconductor and the U.S Army, with one each. The overwhelming number of correspondents were American college students, but I also heard from kids in high school and people with heads of gray hair. I have friends now in Canada, Egypt, England, Germany, and Israel.

Plowing through the 775 requests made fresh the banal observation that young people are good-looking. (This was underlined when my husband would come into my office and, standing over my shoulder, say, "Click on her!") Their freshness made me want to protect them. I felt like Holden Caulfield when he imagined children playing in a field of rye: "What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them." I wanted to catch these students and say, "Don't let a drunk friend drive you home! Be careful who you marry! Take the obscenities off your Facebook profile!"

Facebook also brought out the eHarmony in me. This was matchmaker heaven. Maybe I should throw a party for everyone in my Washington, D.C., network, I thought. Or I could study the profiles and forward compatible-seeming people to each other.

I discovered what a Facebook "poke" is, since I got dozens (the use of this word makes me wonder whether Facebook developers have or haven't read Lonesome Dove). It's a form of Facebook communication for the commitment-phobe who doesn't want to rush into friendship. You are flashed a photo of the person poking and asked if you want to poke back. Despite having read Lonesome Dove, I always did.

I looked at as many profiles as I could. I loved the variety of self-presentation—the displays are as carefully constructed as a Tiffany window. Some were sly (one student declared that now that he was done with midterms, he was moving his corporate headquarters to Dubai) or proudly sentimental (anyone with a line from The Little Prince under favorite quotes). An amazing number mentioned the Beatles under favorite music, and the advertisers for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert should be drooling over their popularity with this demographic. I understood how easy it must be to think you know someone by reading a Facebook profile. Some even wrote to me about being slightly uneasy about how dependent they were on Facebook for making connections—and for weeding out people.

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Emily Yoffe is the author of What the Dog Did: Tales From a Formerly Reluctant Dog Owner. You can send your Human Guinea Pig suggestions or comments to .
Illustration by Nina Frenkel.
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