I was on LiveJournal before MySpace and Facebook and enjoyed it. They had an active knitting community plus people I knew from PerlMonks were there. I remember reading that at one time a very high percentage of the Boston metro area population was on LiveJournal. Made sense with the large number of educational institutions, high tech industries, and great internet infrastructure (i.e. residents may never have experienced a dial-up connection).
I joined Facebook at the invitation of a cousin who was working in South Korea at the time. I was a good way to keep in touch. The way our family has worked is that the matriarch or patriarch kept everyone updated on family events, as had their parents before them. Now that group is in their 80s and some of the most active networkers of the past are too ill to keep up. Enter Facebook to fill the gap.
I did volunteer work last year for MitoAction, an organization based in Boston MA. We were establishing a presence on Facebook so I added a number of MitoAction members to my friends list. They were indeed well connected, in fact, almost all the friend suggestions I got from then on were from Boston area residents and their friends. I visited the Boston area once in the 1970s for a week of HPLC training. My main memories are getting caught in a nor’easter storm flying in from Illinois which delayed my arrival, and the cabbie who picked me up from the airport hotel the next day who was quite a colorful character and got me caught up on all the local news.
So, a couple weeks ago I removed most of the Boston “friends” not because of any animosity but to see if I could contact more of my midwest friends and relatives. It seems to have worked.
