I don’t have a lot of friends.
Sure I have lots of Facebook friends and almost 10 thousand LinkedIn connections but with all due respect to the 5 Mohamed’s in India I really only know a few hundred of my friends/connections and I am cool with that because the smaller number of folks I do consider good friends are awesome.
So awesome that I love, respect, admire and follow everything they are up to via various social media sites. I love knowing what is going on with them because our lives sometime get too busy to actually chat etc.
Everything I just typed is probably something you have heard 100 different places before and I agree with you but something interesting happened to me the other day (twice) that got me thinking….So I am on the phone with one of my closest friends, I am jazzed and want to share some cool news with him and his response was “I know. I saw your tweet”.
He then went on to tell me about what he has been up to and while I knew all these details I am way more polite then he and acted surprised and interested.
Because of Twitter and Facebook I now know way more about my friends then I ever imagined and this actually makes it harder for me to be social with some of them. Having a heart to heart conversation with a friend about something you already know isn’t as fun as you would think.
I am pretty open on the Internets and probably only have a few secrets I haven’t shared…but life changing stuff I keep to myself or at least share with friends/family first. In the last week I have watched someone I know leave her husband and document it in her Facebook status, I have seen a friend lose a job and even someone admit to an illegal act.
These used to be things people would share with only good friends over a coffee and in confidence but now they are all public things and while I don’t mind because I enjoy the entertainment value of reading these developments I do fear that I soon will have nothing to talk about with the people I care for the most.
Am I alone here?