“Similar interests create friends, and aspirations gather those with the same mindset.” As does Facebook, evidently, or at least it frantically tries.

So I did not spend the whole weekend meditating on my worthlessness and lack of loving my fellow humans.  I also went and got a Facebook accound.  Theoretically there may be a connection, but knowing me, my FB probably won’t be much of an Outreach of Love.

What I did notice, however, was that while I was still registering, the web site presented me with several people it thought might be my friends.  In the case of some of them, they were. These were people from a mailing list where I have been a regular for years.  It is not publicly stored though, to the best of my knowledge.  It is fairly easy to gain access and most of the subscribers are lurkers, but it is still fairly limited.  It’s not the Micropenis Support Group Mailing List (my apologies to all who just googled for that) but it is still a place I don’t expect my employer to ever look.

At a later stage in establishing the account, I got a new batch of potential friends. Again there was one or two that seemed familiar.  Given the millions and millions of people already using Facebook, it can’t be an accident.  What, then?  I wondered.

Ironically the most likely answer came from one of my now Facebook friends. She proposed that these were people who had me in their email contact list.  For toward the end of the registration process, the website asked politely for my gmail password.  (I suppose if you had Hotmail, it would ask for the Hotmail passwords, etc.) How stupid do they think I am?  I would not give my gmail password to my second best friend. And to my best friend only if I suspected that the end of my life was drawing near.  Actually it always is, but I have not given her my password yet. So, forget it FB.  But perhaps some other people did, and FB duly put their contacts in their database for later.

Another possibility is that these are people who specifically queried FB with my email address to see if I was a user.  I know we discussed social network sites on the mailing list.  So they may have been curious to see whether I really didn’t use it.  Well, now I do. People can change. A little.