I have moved around a lot over the years and travelled the world, losing touch with everyone I met. Then the internet was invented and after a while Old friends sites came along, then google, then MySpace and Facebook. Suddenly at the click of a mouse we are back in touch with all the people we once loved, liked hung out with, went to school and worked with. How awesome is that? I piled into Facebook and I was at once busy doing a million status updates a day and literally it seemed I was talking to myself as no-one paid much attention to anything and it seemed I missed half of what they posted.

I had a eureka moment about how people keep in  touch. We have all made some sort of effort to get back in touch with loads of people now we have the internet to enable us to find folk we had  thought about over the years but long since lost touch with. Thanks to  the wonders of modern technology we just have to do a bit of a google and hey presto, there you are either up front on a search or tucked in someones contact list on Facebook or such like. So everyone friends each other up and then uses FB or LinkedIn in various ways happy in the knowledge that we are ‘back in touch’. I felt though that FB was  somewhat insidious always asking for my life history if I wanted to like a wall or use an app. You post up your stuff and someone may or may not see it as the information is passing through at light speed and subject to your friend’s inclination to go back a few pages if they only come onto FB once in a while. Also FB changed the settings a while ago so you only see certain stuff from regular contacts unless you knew to rearrange your settings. So unless you are a vigorous user you are not really in touch at all and meanwhile just enriching mr Zucherberg and his advertisers. Also many of the users just don’t use it so you’re not really in touch.

So everyone is status updating and casting a cursory glance over what other people post if they happen to notice it in the clutter of all their friends and their friends friends updates. Thats not in touch. that’s lazy pseudo contact. If you cared about or where interested enough to make someone a FB friend how about a bit of real contact once in a while. Remember a phone call or its modern version of Skyping which is even better ! Or just email with a hello whatcha up to bit of back and forth. Of course you cannot just hook up with your chums on the other side of the world for a beer but you can certainly Skype, call, email them, you know, single them out for a bit of contact from you personally rather than just updating your status in the hope they might see it?

I am going to go out of my way to send an email regularly to the people I have got back in touch with. Try and meet up with those in the same few counties or at least country. We have a regular Skype with those who have embraced it. But I don’t want just to be one of 650 Facebook friends.