You’re never too old for Facebook

By Anne Krishnan | September 16, 2007 at 2:00a.m.

By ANNE KRISHNAN

MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS

Until recently, I had never been to MySpace or Facebook. Even though I’m not yet 30, I had the feeling that I had missed that trend, that I was just a year or two behind the curve.

But when I read in BusinessWeek that the number of people 35 and over visiting Facebook had doubled in June from the year before, I decided I had to give it a try.

I’m glad I did. It’s not hard to see why Facebook has garnered 31 million active users in just over three years. A more polished alternative to the anything-goes MySpace, the site connects long-lost friends and new acquaintances.

For those who worry about privacy, Facebook requires participants to use their real names and has pretty strict safeguards that users have the option of making even tighter.

But let me back up. Social networking sites allow people to create personal profiles, like mini-Web pages, and use them as a platform for making connections with other people on the site.

‘Find your Friends’

The site, www.facebook.com, is intriguing from the get-go. A nifty feature, “Find your Friends,” makes it very easy to see who you might know who is already registered on the site; just type in your e-mail address and password (multiple ones, if you’ve got them), and the program will spit out every contact in your address book who is also on Facebook.

When I saw that dozens of my high school and college friends and some co-workers from my first job were on Facebook, I had to join.

After you join, it’s easy to set up a profile and customize it. Just answer as many questions as you want out of a multistep questionnaire, with topics including political and religious views, favorite movies, education and employment. Upload a picture, and the basic profile is finished.

Facebook also allows programmers to develop applications that further personalize profiles.

Making contact

Many of the applications have a component that encourages you to make contact with other users. I’m still a little shy about reaching out to my friends on Facebook, but reaching out is really the point.

One of the site’s main features is the “news feed,” a running list of users’ activities. When one of them befriends someone else, adds an application or changes part of his or her profile, it shows up on my feed. So when my Australian friend removed “single” from her relationship status, I noticed.

There are many ways to find people you know on Facebook. It takes just the click of a button to ask someone to be friends, then another click to accept the invitation. Once two people are friends, each can see the other’s profile.

The other way to see someone’s profile is to belong to the same geographic area, university or workplace-based network. Joining a university or workplace network involves jumping through some hoops — namely, having an e-mail address from that institution. To join the University of North Carolina network as an alumna, for instance, I had to get an alumni.unc.edu e-mail address. But because anyone in the 40,000-person UNC network can see anyone else’s profile, I suppose I appreciate the precautions.

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