It's been about three years since I closed my Facebook account, but I recently just "re-enlisted."  I was looking for a better way to post and share pictures online, and Facebook is one service that does that really well.  It turns out it does a bunch of other things well, which was unexpected. 

I was reluctant to use Facebook for a long time because I dreaded being contacted by old high school acquaintances and random friends of friends who like to ask questions such as, "What have you been up to?" and "Remember that time in high school...?"  The whole idea of starting relationships with people I don't already have relationships with really held no appeal for me. 

But what I realized is that it's pretty easy to simply only be Facebook friends with people I already know and communicate with in real life.  And by being Facebook friends as well as actual friends, I'm able to keep up to date with all their little weekend trips and hobbies and whatnot. 

I thought that aspect would be overwhelming, and it probably would be if I didn't have a fairly strict yet simple criteria for accepting friend requests:  With few exceptions, if we haven't physically hung out together in the past year, we're probably not friends.  And thankfully it's easy to remove or simply ignore people who say a lot of annoying things or post pictures of their hamsters.

To be honest, the first week or so was a little overwhelming, with people contacting me and pointing out how I finally ended my reign as one of the last Facebook holdouts.  It definitely helped that I was recently at a wedding, so I had seen and spoken to people I was attempting to electronically befriend.  This made things a lot less awkward.  After I got used to the interface and learned my way around, it became almost second nature.