Cyber-stalking

I love facebook. Admittedly, since my return to the US, I'm not on it as much as I used to be, but it can still suck me in. Of course, I'm obviously not alone in my love affair with facebook. With over 200 million users, facebook is clearly aiming to take over the world. And yet, somehow, there are still people who have not hopped on the bandwagon. It's shocking, I know. But now that I've gotten my mom on facebook, I figure no one is out of my reach. Why I feel it is my personal mission to get everyone I know on facebook, I'm not sure. But this is why I ended up spending most of last night cyber-stalking facebook friends in an effort to show my non-facebook friend everything she is missing out on.


She was clearly fascinated by the phenomenon, but I'm still not sure I won her over. She kept insisting that she didn’t have time to reply to personal emails, much less connect with (and cyber-stalk!) old friends on facebook. But she’s clearly missing the point. Because in my experience, beyond the initial “Hey there! So glad to reconnect! How’s life?” written on the occasional wall, there’s not that much reconnecting happening. It’s more about having the option to reconnect and the option to cyber-stalk.
And of course it’s also about giving other people the option to cyber-stalk you. Because some part of us likes the idea of pseudo-random people glimpsing into the Photoshopped version of our lives. Well, obviously some part of me likes it. If I didn’t I would activate the privacy option on my blog, but I don’t. Instead, I welcome blog-stalkers. I secretly hope for them. And because I still haven’t gotten around to installing Google Analytics (it’s a way to track a website’s traffic) on this blog, I can pretend I have a whole mass of blog stalkers out there.

It sounds kind of crazy when I put it like that. And maybe it is. I mean, as a child it would be the end of the world if someone read your diary, but as a grown-up blogger – you kind of hope for it. Bizarre, huh?

But that’s all I got for the moment (it is a three-day weekend after all). For more profound thoughts on the subject of blog-stalking check out this post by someone I recently blog-stalked. And if enough people click on the link, she will see from her Google Analytics reporting that robyninatlanta posted a link to her blog, thus outing myself as a blog-stalker!

And I apologize if all this talk of cyber/blog stalking was lost on you, but if you don’t know what it is, you’re clearly not taking advantage of all that Web 2.0 has to offer. But don’t worry...maybe I’ll host an intro to Web 2.0 webinar or create an instructional YouTube video or iTunes podcast…we’ll work something out. You’ll be cyber-stalking in no time.