The New Community

If you’ve been following along on Facebook you might have noticed or figured out that my Father in Law passed away this week. He fought a long, hard battle against pancreatic cancer but finally passed away peacefully Wednesday morning.

What’s really been amazing is how many of Sue’s friends came out of the woodworks to offer their support and condolences, not through the usual channels but in response to her posting of her Father’s passing on Facebook.

Facebook may have started out as a place for college hook-ups but it’s become what Classmates.com and Reunion.com could never be – the place for friends to reconnect and catch up. In the past months I’ve found tons of friends from high school and college whom I haven’t spoken to in years. We’ve caught up, compared notes on life and found that the ties that bound us together in our teenage years still mean something.

In Sue’s case it has been a place for her friends from the time she was a child to remember her Father’s life and honor his memory. This is what social media is all about – it’s the connections.

I’ll bet the founders of Facebook never thought of that. But a great web app is a platform for the users to make of it what they can. Instead of trying to force the types of interactions like Classmates.com and Reunion.com (and monetize each contact), Facebook lets its users make of the system what they will. If you want to open yourself up to contacts from high school, just put your school and graduation year up there and the old friends will come calling.

And speaking of pancreatic cancer – it’s one of the deadliest forms of cancer. Please, if you can, learn more and help fight this killer.

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