The Facebook Conundrum

Awhile back I took some time off from Facebook, but after a year hiatus, I re-joined the world of social networking. I found that my long distance friends considered email an obsolete form of communication, and I rarely heard from any of them in the year that I had taken a break. It is a nice general way to keep in touch with friends without much effort.  A status appears, I make a comment, and voila! We are "connected". However, over the last year, a twofold conundrum has developed for me regarding Facebook.

The first issue is, somehow, I feel like Facebook has become a necessity. My world will not be as complete without it, and I would lose touch with my friends. Which then begs the question, if I really lose touch with my "friends" then were they really my friends in the first place? Second, in some ways I feel like Facebook crosses privacy boundaries. It used to be, if I had my chat availability marked as "offline" then no one could tell if I was on Facebook or not. Recently the chat features were updated, and it wasn't until a couple of days ago that I discovered the update that now bothers me. I may have my chat marked as unavailable, I almost always do, but people can still see that I am on Facebook.  They can even send a chat message, when I am "offline", but the friend pretty much knows that I am online, because there is my picture. It suddenly feels like an invasion of privacy, you know? In general, I don't mind my true friends knowing I am online, but let's face it, almost everyone has someone or several someones on their friend lists that truly aren't friends.  Most people probably don't consider this a big deal, but it just feels a little underhanded, and it makes me wonder if Facebook has changed this, what other features have they tweaked that make me more available without my knowledge? It gives me pause to wonder if this is actually a necessary part of my life or not. I haven't reached any firm conclusions yet, but I can say, I don't want to just follow blindly because everyone else doesn't have a problem with it. It feels like they have stripped a little bit of personal control away, and I have to be honest, for a control freak like me, that doesn't set well.