No, not stalking. When the Attic closure was announced on a local message board, the post included a list of the last few shows. One is by a New Brunswick band called The Divorcees, who have been on my radar for months as a band I need to get around to checking out. (My default option is generally to see bands live rather than listen to their MySpace tunes, or whatever, so I haven't actually listened to any of their stuff except what I've caught on awards shows. But I digress.)

Anyway, the Attic post didn't include the cover or anything, so I thought I'd check Facebook to see whether there was an event created for the show. (I also like that Add Event option because it reminds me I plan to go somewhere. Hey, I'm old and my mind is going.)

So I looked up events involving The Divorcees, and as usual there are a couple of events for this show (opening acts and headliners often create their own copies of events to send to their friends, which once led to me having three separate events for the same show listed because I knew someone from every band involved and they all invited everyone they knew. But I digress.)

I picked the first event, which gave the cover, and added it to my events. And then when I went to look at it more closely, guess how many people in total were attending or had been invited?

One. Me.

Why would you create an event and then not invite anybody? I started to fear I had accidentally connected with a band member's personal Daytimer or something!

I've invited a couple of people because the event says I can, but come on!

I guess that's not so much inappropriate as possibly ineffective, but we'll see how many people show up anyway!

Heh. I love Facebook. I just found a band profile for Matt Mays & El Torpedo and added myself to their fan listing. And the update thingie popped up with the message, "You are now a fan of Matt Mays & El Torpedo."

Thank you, Captain Obvious. And also, "Finally!"

Heh.

Okay, so we've established that I probably spend too much time on the Internet. I do, however, know that blogs, MySpace, and Facebook are all supposed to do different things. As a result, many of my "LJ Friends" are people I will never, ever meet in real life. I read their blogs because I like the way they write.

MySpace may have started out as a way to keep track of your "real life" friends, but in practice a lot of people have tens of thousands of "friends," and in my case about half my MySpace friends are people I only know on the Internet. The rest of them are bands. I like being able to listen to their music and check for gigs.

Now, Facebook: that's definitely intended to keep track of your real-life friends. And with very few exceptions, the only people I've asked to be my Facebook friends are people I really do know in real life. Okay--in a few cases they're people I knew a long, long time ago.

And okay, in a few cases they're people I know from the Internet.

But for the most part, I do not do the MySpace or LJ thing of trying to add people just because I find them interesting. I do, however, join groups for bands in hopes of finding out about their upcoming gigs. (I seriously love Facebook "events.")

Last week or so, though, I got a friend invitation from someone I am pretty sure I don't know, and when I investigated I discovered he's a member of a local band I have heard of and mean to check out one day, but have not yet. I assume he's going through membership lists of groups devoted to other local bands and adding new friends so he can invite them to join his band's group.

I debated about half a second before I accepted his friend invitation, and I discreetly bypassed the "how do you know this person?" question Facebook asks you, because actually I don't. And then, of course, I joined the group. Because hey.

I'm retaining my policy of not asking people to be my Facebook friend unless I'm pretty confident they do consider me to be their friend, but it turns out I don't have any sort of a policy against other people asking me. And apparently I see Facebook at least partly as a convenient means to find more music to listen to, which is pretty much half my reason for being on the Internet in the first place.

Well, as long as we're all clear, I guess that's fine.

(Unlike, say, MySpace, where you can have hundreds of thousands of friends you don't know.)

However, Catbook doesn't seem to mind that kind of thing. As a result, my cats have been added by some flame-point RagDoll in New Jersey, who has something like 2500 friends. What a tomcat!

(I consider that harmless. I just wonder if the cat is really that friendly!)

I've just been looking at the profile of one of those old air cadet friends I spoke of. When he was eighteen, he was a complete nutcase and very funny.

I'm getting the impression that now, he is equally funny and still a nutcase.

It's nice to know.

Well, partly about Facebook. I know it's been around for a while but it seems like for some reason it's just taken off in a big way in my area, judging by the number of references to it I've been hearing lately, both in the local media and randomly among people whose conversations I've overheard. So I accept that I'm behind the curve in real technological-uptake terms, but not so much in technological-uptake-in-the-Maritimes terms.

in the past couple of weeks I've noted a couple of entries on my friends-list from people who are updating their LJs after long absences, and remarking that "since I got started on Facebook, I don't blog much anymore."

I certainly don't think this is the end of the blog, but I'm sure there are people who used blogs as a way of keeping in touch with their friends, and now they have Facebook which does that much more efficiently. Those of us who are addicted to writing as an activity in and of itself are blogging as much as ever, but other folks have other options.

( More on Facebook, nostalgia, and the Regional Gliding School )

Anyway, despite the stalker feelings, the Facebook thing is definitely a win for me. And though I try to avoid the sort of right-now cultural references that will date your story in five minutes, I have this temptation to include a passage like,

Jordy hadn't been so weirded out since the day he discovered his grandmother was on Facebook. (The rest of Kowalski didn't seem to share his reaction, since the next time he checked they'd all added her as a friend.)

(If I ever write a story with Kowalski at home, I'll have to accept the fact the characters are probably plugged-in, but at the moment in the tent, it's not such an issue.)

In the meantime I can actually smell airfield dust and sunscreen. Ah, those were the days.

Okay, here's the horrible thing about Facebook--I was just added by someone I used to teach with, whose kids also went to our school. No, not that exactly, it's just that in following friends-of-friends links from her profile (because, as noted, Facebook turns us all into stalkers) I found pictures of some of the kids from my Grade Three/Four class the first year I taught.

Their wedding photos, for instance.

No! No! You are only this big, and you are supposed to stay that way! I don't care if it was fifteen years ago!

Unfortunately, I haven't dug up a profile for the little guy who gave me Coney and Kinsey. Not that he would be a "little guy" anymore, apparently!

God, I am so old!

Despite having only three of them.

Because there is a new application inside Facebook called (of course) "Catbook." And I added it, and then created profiles for Coney, Vlad, and Bojo.

I know, I know, I'm embarrassed. But I notice I'm not deleting the profiles.

So I was looking at a few of my Facebook friends' profiles yesterday, and as I clicked out of one belonging to a barn friend, I spotted the following status note:

"Friend Name is now friends with Garth Hudson."

And I screeched to a halt. Just for a second I was all, "Whoa! GARTH HUDSON????"

No. Not that Garth Hudson. Some other guy entirely.

Even so. Just for a second there it was a pretty cool thought.

Okay, when you log into Facebook, it shows you what your Facebook Friends are up to, right? Well, I logged in a minute ago and discovered that one of my FFs had just left a group called something like "I'm not a Groupie or a Roadie, I'm a Band-Aid!"

And looking at the name (and then the group description, because you know I went and looked) I was sorely puzzled. I mean, I know "band-aid" is a joke from Almost Famous. What confused me was the fact that the group description didn't draw any distinction between groupies and roadies.

Honestly, I'm not sure how anyone could confuse the two. If you don't mind a horsey comparison, it'd be like people who rodeo not being able to tell the difference between a buckle bunny and a stable hand.

I nearly joined the group just to see whether anybody ever asked that question, but we're trying to find a work-related application for Facebook so I decided it would be best if my Joel Plaskett and Matt Mays groups (and an infant one for Little Mosque) were my most informal groups.

Funny-as-hell group name, though...

I haven't tended to friends-lock posts very much, but we're experimenting with Facebook at work (a lot of libraries are trying to figure out how to use social software to reach users, and Facebook is well adapted to this type of thing.) When I set up my profile I configured it to pull in my LJ posts as a Notes feed.

Anyway, I ran a little experiment and discovered that if I friends-lock an entry or set it to private, it won't show up in Facebook.

All of which simply means that if I get really mad about something and rant, I may friends-lock the entry so I won't seem like an unprofessional maniac on Facebook.