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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

(Continued from page 1)

As I kept clicking, links started forming. Now "mutual friends" were showing up. I was friended by an old friend, John Schwartz, a science writer for the New York Times, who is a superannuated Facebook pioneer. Then I was contacted by another fiftysomething, a corporate lawyer, who, I saw on her profile, was also a friend of John's. I got such a ping of pleasure when a connection was made that it occurred to me the Bush administration could stop violating the laws on national security letters and instead just send friend requests to terrorism suspects—how could they resist?

When my editor David Plotz (who, not being on Facebook, has no Facebook friends, although I am now a Facebook friend of one of his real-life friends) suggested I write a follow-up, I said I thought it sounded too boastful to say how many friends I now had. He reminded me that these weren't my friends, these were people "who are actually nothing to you." This made my heart lurch. David, these are my friends! But I wondered what made me feel a connection to people I'd never met, whom I knew only through a click of the mouse. This was clarified in the Facebook message from a new friend, Brenda Bradley, a Cambridge University zoologist doing research on primate evolution. She explained a theory about what drove the evolution of human intelligence: It was the need to monitor and maintain complex social networks—the most successful primates were the ones who understood the dynamic social relationships around them. Developing these skills was the precursor to, for example, being able to hunt cooperatively, not vice versa. "So Facebook may indeed be an evolutionary milestone more important than the first stone tool or the control of fire!" she wrote.

I heard from about a dozen Facebook fiftysomethings (possibly that is every Facebook fiftysomething). Oh, we few, we lonely few. Some I inspired to join and became their only friend. Some had existing accounts, and I still became their only friend. One told me that despite several requests, his twentysomething children kept refusing to accept him as a friend.

I also discovered another Facebook generation gap: It can be as lonely to be a 25-year-old on Facebook as a 50-year-old. I heard from several of them who said that because there was no Facebook until after they graduated from college, it had been hard for them to persuade their friends to sign up.

My new friend Chris Broussard, an IT administrator in Louisiana, also provided me with the most intensely flattering experience of my life. He created a Facebook group in my honor [registration required]. It didn't seem right to join—I always yell at people at televised award ceremonies, "Don't clap for yourself" (and to paraphrase Groucho, I couldn't belong to any group that would have me as a group).

Several of my new friends wondered if I, having discovered Facebook, was going to keep up with it. I don't know. It's been tremendous fun, but it may be too late for me to incorporate it into my life, and my account will ultimately languish like my grandmother's VCR. But I will be interested to see if Facebook and sites of its ilk end up being a granfalloon, or a revolution.

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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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