i always resisted joining most of the social networks. friendster and orkut seemed silly to me – i had enough friends at the time and my friends wouldn’t join it anyways. myspace is just plain ugly. but i’ve been getting facebook email requests from friends. it also seemed like a worthwhile network to join since a lot of my photography and blogging contacts seemed to be on facebook and i wanted to make sure i wasn’t missing any more events. i signed up last week and i’ve been addicted. more interesting than email, and i’ve found friends i went to school with, worked with and even went to elementary school with. it’s amazing to stumble across people you lost contact with.

the interface is very clean and organized. very un-myspace. how anyone can look through myspace pages amazes me…so much visual diarrea. facebook just keeps me more connected to my friends. with email, it’s a hurdle to remember to send a friend an email. with facebook, their face appears randomly in your friends list to say “hey…what’s that friend been up to lately?”. you can leave quick notes and messages. update your status and people know what you’re up to, whether something as important as buying a home, or as unimportant as getting a coffee.

i think the real tipping point to joining, is due to the large number of non-tech friends who’ve joined. with myspace and other sites, it’s usually for the more tech crowd. i have friends in facebook that i know would never create a blog or join myspace. facebook is very friendly and easy to use. there are no hurdles to joining. fill in a couple fields, add some friends, fill out the rest as you please or don’t. a very relaxed webapp. the most amazing thing i found about facebook is how easy it is to add your friends. it can check your yahoo/hotmail/gmail addressbook and look for friends already on facebook or offer to send them an invite email. it found friends of mine right away. very cool.

so if you’re on facebook add me as a friend.