Searching for Friends

It was like wandering into a raucous freshman dorm three decades after I last wore bell bottoms.

In just three years, Facebook.com has exploded in popularity as a gated community for the young. But after the social networking site late last year lifted its ban on anyone older than a recent college graduate, I decided to have a look around.

I'm still puzzled by this mysterious process in which some people invite you to become friends (meaning you can see their home pages, photos and compilation of friends) while others blow you off. Some twentysomethings "friended" me out of the blue but never sent me any messages or replied to mine. It almost seems like the point is to collect a long list of names rather than establish relationships outside your immediate circle.

Still, there's an addictive quality to Facebook as you keep checking back to see if you have any new-friend requests or messages -- and feel like a loser if you're isolated. What's more, there's the voyeuristic aspect of getting a peek into people's lives and how they choose to present themselves.

I got (okay, stole) the idea from Slate columnist Emily Yoffe, who describes her social-networking skills as being on par with Ted Kaczynski's. She joined up, wrote a piece and by now has 1,057 friends -- so many that Facebook briefly shut down her communications for exceeding some kind of limit.

So I posted a rudimentary profile and friended Emily, as well as my college-age daughter (who essentially indicated she would rather torch her computer than give me access to her page). I found a friend from The Post (who rather impressively had John Updike as a friend, although he couldn't vouch for the authenticity). And then I waited. And waited.

A young woman in Toronto sent me a friend request, and soon I knew far more about Kelly than I wanted to, thanks to a recent Facebook innovation known as a newsfeed. Every time one of your friends adds a new friend, drops a boyfriend or changes a profile picture, a notification pops up on your home page.

I learned that Kelly had joined the group "Green Acres Day Camp ex-staff in the 1980's and '90s." That she had joined "Costco Lovers" and "Oshawa Red Roof Pizza Hut" and "Old Navy, Store #5463" and "caroline and rachel's school of food fighting and lunch throwing." And such groups as "I do nothing all day . . . because I DON'T HAVE A JOB."

I checked out these groups and they seemed to consist of Kelly and five or six of her friends, with only a handful of posts. Maybe this is the 21st-century equivalent of hanging out.

A more serious young woman named Heather seemed to be quite the committed liberal, who kept attending such films as "An Inconvenient Truth" (though I also learned that she attended a "Drink Specials at Nachos! Party"). I kept getting copied on invitations she sent to her peeps, such as: "Join the Columbia University Working Families Party and the Columbia Coalition Against the War in a night of debate about ways to end the war in Iraq." I was even kept apprised of her mood swings: Heather is "feeling that the world is an extremely crazy place." Take a number.

Meanwhile, I was determined to get into double digits. I got in touch with an ex-colleague, New York Times reporter John Schwartz, who posts wry comments on his recent doings and has 142 friends. But a bit of investigation found that he had an unfair advantage: His son had started a group called "Friend My Father."

One young man who supports Chris Dodd for president and has started a Facebook group for the Connecticut senator boasted that he had gotten through to C-SPAN with "my typically excited pro-CHRIS DODD TIRADE."