Chernobil or Facebook

There's nothing on TV, just idiots and a re-run of Bond's Moonraker. I've just watched again another IT Crowd episode, after a documentary on Chernobil disaster, which amazingly seems to have happened a day like today back in 1986, 24 years ago! Wooow, tempus fugit! I was 12 y.o. going on 13. That was my last year in elementary school -- or maybe was it the next one?

Many things happened on these years: my family moved from a tiny apartment to a bigger flat, where I got my own room. We bought, finally, a color TV set, and I won a computer with an essay I wrote about the Roman monuments in my city. It was my first PC, and it was kind of a pain in the arse. I couldn't play at all, since there were no games for such machines. And above all, I couldn't read the instructions, which were in English, nor understand the OS guide book. I was 13, I wanted to have fun playing, and all I had was a log talking about assembler's hexadecimal code. I felt frustrated. Now, things are completely different. Computers are for fun and everyone can use them.

Tonight I was watching IT Crowd's episode about Friendface, something similar to Facebook. It is defined as "basically a disease based on friendship". Roy is re-meeting an old girlfriend (the Joker) with whom he had already split up, and Moss is accompanying Jen to her reunion party where they unrealistically show off in front of her old school girlfriends. It is a bloody mess and turns out to be a total disaster.

I personally don't see much the use of Facebook, besides fucking around or wasting time sneaking around friend's friend's friend's photo albums. Apart from the fact that some people seem not to understand the basic principles of privacy, my main curiosity is to figure out what is the point of having 1500 friends, way beyond human capacity to remember names or faces. What kind of friendship is this? Does it generates any real activity?

I've made some tests and it seems that most people don't even enter into their accounts for months, or they lose their interest soon after the first exchanges of posts. If FB's fiendship is not backed with a previous real and close friendship, it soon disappears. So, what's the point of it on the first place?