Facebook, as many people know, is a social networking site for keeping in touch with the people you know, and for sharing things with those people. I've found that it strengthens the weak bonds I've had with people I've met a few times and gotten to know, and has re-united me with people from my past whom I regretted not keeping in touch with. There are still people who haven't joined—I should just send them an email—but for those that have I've found things out about some of them that I really should have known anyway (including a pregnancy) and some I don't want to know much about (relationship details).

The above ad sometimes appears in my Facebook News Feed. It's fairly clearly marked as a sponsored ad, and while a little too close to looking like information about my friends for comfort (and why on Earth would I want to share an ad I didn't seek out?), the site has to make a dollar, and they do that through advertising. I see a problem with this, however: why can't the above ad have at least something to do what it knows about me? Facebook seems not to be aware of the fact that I'm in a relationship, something I explicitly told the site! It's a little shocking that here are in 2007 with contextual ads being all the rage and the website that has the most personal in both qualitative and quantitative can't figure out my status. I'm tired of Facebook thinking that I'm tired of being single, especially when it knows I'm not single!

Al3x: “The dating world doesn't need another personals site embracing blogs. Rather, "blog dates" like the one my friend is looking forward to should become commonplace. Right now, asking out a blogger you admire is sort of a stalkerish thing to do, but that's largely because there's no social protocol or precedent for it. Hopefully that will change.”