I’ll admit it.  I was a little late to the Facebook party.  It’s not because of lack of interest or belief that the service was extremely powerful - if anything it was quite the opposite.  I watched from afar for a couple years as Facebook began to take shape.  I graduated from UNC before Facebook arrived, and the idea of signing up for an account as a recent graduate felt too stalker-ish at first.

Even from afar I thought I saw the value in the platform.  So last summer when a friend of mine from college reluctantly convinced me to sign up, I began my Facebook life, ever so casually. For the last year or so I’ve mainly just accepted friend requests and been amused when an old friend woud drop a line about the latest happenings. 

That is, until this week.  While idly sitting around one day I decided to post a few pictures from college that I already had up on my Flickr account.  It started with a few funny pictures of groups and individuals. 

And then the comments started pouring in.  I posted the above picture from my junior year of college and was simply shocked at the number of people who made comments reminiscing about our time at UNC (at last count we’re looking at 13 comments from 9 unique people on that pic alone).  People I haven’t seen in years began to comment and in a matter of days, there was some bonafide community golng on. 

Amazing.  Sure, Facebook can be a waste of time.  And there’s plenty to argue about in regards to Facebook as a business, how they’re overvalued, or how people who get addicted to Facebook are lame.  But there’s no denying that the power of enabling our existing social networks - especially ones that without Facebook would be dead - is an awesome thing.