A Great Notion

I saw Peggy Lauderdale Shackleford briefly at the reunion and then, later, we exchanged E-Mails. Peggy had a good idea: she said there ought to be a way to keep everybody in touch with each other over the years.

That got me thinking. E-Mail is great and we've made good use of it this time around, but it's neither efficient nor practical: with E-Mail alone, keeping everybody in the loop means that we all have to let everybody else know when our E-Mail addresses change, and we all have to keep our own Address Books up-to-date. It's either that or a few people end up doing all the work, like the people on our Reunion Committee. But, really, we want to give those folks a rest, after the great job they did on the reunion.

We need something that goes beyond E-Mail. Something that is designed to maintain connections between people. Something that does all the housekeeping, leaving us free to get in, find out what's going on, and get out. We need a Social Network.

There are such things. MySpace and Facebook are the best known examples, and of the two, Facebook is the best. Bill Gates and Jim Cramer have both joined Facebook.

The idea behind Facebook is simple. It's an elegantly wrought website that you can join. When you join, you get a Profile where you can store information about yourself, pictures of the grandkids, stuff like that. Stuff that no one else can see unless you let them. You can also exchange messages with other people, like E-Mail, except that you don't have to know anybody's address. You just have to be associated with them, in Facebook, as a friend or member of the same group. And it's all free.

If this sounds like a commercial, it is.

The catch is, everybody has to join Facebook. Actually, not everybody - just those who want to keep up with everybody who wants to be kept up with. Let it not be said that the Class of '57 eschews individualism and the right to be left alone. But I would say, if it works for Bill Gates, what have you got to lose?

I joined Facebook. Then I invited Betty to join, in the hope of staying out of Divorcebook. The invitation went to Betty's E-Mail address, and contained a link that took her straight to the Facebook Registration Page. When she joined, she accepted my invitation to associate and we were able to agree on a relationship, which we both designated as "married". As I understand it, that prevents us from having that relationship with anyone else in Facebook.

Then I put up pictures of three of my grandchildren. It was as easy as sending them through E-Mail. But the nice thing about it is, you don't have to scatter your pictures all over the Internet; you just put them up in one place, and then all those who have a connection with you can come to see them whenever they want to. If you let them.

Next, I created a group and called it "Hillsboro Class of 1957". I invited Betty to join this group. Another invitation went out, this time to her Facebook Profile, since she was a member of Facebook by then, and she accepted. Flush with success, I then invited Peggy to join and she did. As they joined, I made them both Administrators, which allows them to invite others to join the group, too. So Peggy invited Gayle Bulleit Moses and Alice Ann Taylor Parks. Now, when Gayle and Alice Ann get a spare moment, they're going to start inviting people, and so on. When this gets going, the law of geometric progression and my calculations indicate that the whole class should be registered in Facebook in about 3 seconds. The Internet is scary. But, in Facebook, everybody knows your name. And the idea is, any news, good or bad, from anybody, gets posted to the "Hillsboro Class of 1957" group. And everybody goes there to find out what's going on.

Wait for an invitation. Then be there.