HB - FB!

A screen grab of my Facebook page. 2/2/2025 facebook

 Facebook started as a response to the poor hard-copy student directory available at Harvard in 2003. It was so bad that Mark Zuckerberg said he could make something better online. "Thefacebook" went live February 4, 2004 for Harvard students.

 The social media site went public to everyone 13 or older in 2006. I'm not sure when I joined, but the earliest post I found was June 9, 2011.

Like most people my age, an end-of-the-era Baby Boom baby, Facebook is something we used to find or catch up with friends from high school and college and keep tabs on the lives our kids lived online.

It was fun to connect and reminisce with old friends and find connections with others as the web of 'people you may know' led to those far enough in the rear-view mirror to have faded from memory. I like using it to showcase photos of places I rode or visited. A few years after starting a blog, I used Facebook, it dropped 'the' in front of Facebook in 2005, to generate views for the blog.

By that time, I had profiles on LinkedIn and Twitter (now X) where I post the latest blog. In late 2024, I opened a profile on Bluesky, one of the newer social media spaces, for the same purpose. 

The political uses and misuses of Facebook are the main reason I'm not as frequent a visitor as before to Facebook. In some cases, I unfriended people instead of being confronted with content I'd like to avoid, that's been good.

One political post couldn't make me cringe, I've kept ties with nearly all of my long-time online friends. Thankfully, the act of unfriending someone doesn't send a message you've cut ties, so it takes a while before you realize you've not seen one of their posts, or they pop up in a "you may know" list of suggested new friends.

The bullying, the dishonest political posts, and the inability to remove untrue posts has sullied the experience. In an era where 'truth is what you want it to be,' it seems anything goes.  It was in an episode of Seinfeld once, "It's true, if you believe it." Well, it's not, but in the interest of peace, if you prefer to see it that way, it's fine, as long as you give me the same respect.

Happy Birthday, Facebook - in our modern world there is no perfect product and Facebook is light-years from perfect, but it's been a lifeline for 21 years - thank you.