Time, Friends and Facebook

As I use Facebook more and more different aspects strike me. The one that came to light was that fact that none of us have any time.

This last weekend I was lucky enough to get to spend it with my best childhood friends is Austin Texas. While fun was had by all, this fun was 20 years in the making. Each of us, there were three, have our lives, schedules and logistics that have conspired to make this nearly a quarter century in the making. This is not a good or acceptable interval. It got me thinking about time and friendships.

While we all have our lives packed in such a way that we have very few spare weeks, weekends, days or even hours. We do dozens of things in a given day, where our grandparents or Europeans would only have a handful. The absence of these big blocks of time make maintaining the relationships beyond the immediate very difficult. Even a leisurely phone call is challenging because we'll be leaving in a few minutes...

While our time is so short what I notice with my own time is that I have lots of free seconds. 30, 60 maybe 180 seconds littered throughout my day. What do I do with mine? Mostly nothing! Look up the game, the most recent tech announcement, etc. The value of these seconds is not great.

So to recap, lots of wasted seconds and friends that I'd really like to keep up with. How might these two things be married....Facebook!

I've found that since I've been on Facebook, with an iPhone in my pocket I've grown closer to 20 folks and communicated with them more, and on more topics then I've done in my life, and it's only been a couple months.

Facebook on the iPhone have made my life better by making my friends more available and allowing me to use spare seconds in a radically more valuable way. If you believe, as I do, that from human communication come ideas, insights and goodness we should be in for something truly exciting.