In your Face

I recently joined Facebook accidentally. I checked out the site to search for an old friend, realized I could only view her profile by registering, and in the course of registering inadvertently created my own profile and flung online friend “invites” to my email address book.

Facebook is one of the newer online phenomenons; it rocketed founder Mark Zuckerberg from a 19 year-old college student to a 23 year-old uber-wealthy Harvard dropout.  35 million people use the site to remain connected with high school and college buddies, work associates, family, and even strangers with shared interests. (One of my friends, along with 52 other like-minded folks, belongs to the “Holy Crap! American Gladiators is coming back on the air!!” group.)

Status updates (“Jennifer Taylor is not returning your calls because she has too much work”) and uploadable applications that let you share your personality style, load your favorite music, or adopt virtual pets provide countless opportunities for customization, and its emphasis on connecting with people you already know—rather than the massive tagging of “friends” on MySpace—helps Facebook brand itself as a cooler, more exclusive community.

A recent Newsweek article explains Zuckerberg’s vision of the site, which “revolves around a concept he calls the ‘social graph.’ As he describes it, this is a mathematical construct that maps the real-life connections between every human on the planet. Each of us is a node radiating links to the people we know.”

While it may take more than six degrees of separation to link to someone else, it is possible to see your friends’ friends on their page, then invite them to be your friends, thus giving you access to friends twice removed and adding literal and figurative links to a bigger and bigger network.

I don’t have time to do all this (my status update could just as easily, if more ironically, read “Jennifer Taylor is not on Facebook because she has too much work”) but it’s an interesting concept. One of the company’s co-founders recently asserted that in five years’ time, “everyone on the planet” will be on Facebook.

What kind of potential does this have for your local church, for the churches in your city, and for all of us together? Do you have a Facebook page? Are you doing anything interesting with it?