facebook bitching

I am sure ALLLLLLLLLLLLL of you are on facebook.

Ever discovered when you add someone, you already have like 5 common friends? Or that when you are curious, and you click on someone who has made comments to your friends' pictures, and then you see that you have like 10 common friends?

I am not talking about close-knit circles of friends here. I am talking about the rice-queen/potato-queen society. I am not kidding you but there seems to be something like that emerging on facebook...

I can seriously not believe this. I had a Thai friend (really, just friend) who told me about this Swiss guy that he was totally in love with and that they had such an awesome time together... (I better not write more, because the people might even read this!!!)

Thai friend told me: look at this profile, mister Hans Meier (name changed). I looked at the Swiss guy's profile and promptly, he's a friend of a Malaysian friend too, avidly commenting on both guy's oh-so-cute and oh-so-hot new pictures.

Today, I added someone else on my friends list (hey, I only have like 140 friends, mostly not even gay), and he had someone on his friends list that I heard of. I clicked that heard-of expat's profile.

Boom, 4 common friends. One of them lives in London, one of them in KL and two of them in Bangkok (that dont know each other at all).

What's going on here? I am starting to think something...the circle of Westerners, often (s)expats, and I am talking about under 40-year olds now, who do this "online-thing", is only so big...

And on the other side, the circle of Asian gays who like Westerners exclusively, or partly, and network with them online, is only so big...

Smallish community, and smallish community, heaps of networking, THAT is the result: A tiny community of a few thousand people...

I think that for many people, facebook is like a gayromeo.com with bigger profiles and more information. There are these Western guys on facebook who have like 3400 friends, ALLLLLLL Asian boys. For them, facebook is apparently a tool to get to know (and fuck?) Asian boys...one "cuter" than the other. good on you I say, but it gets odd if we share like 10 similar "friends".

Who am I to judge them though? Well, I have built up a circle of online-friends from all over the world (mostly in Asia though) who are actually friends. Not the really close ones but still, friends.

And then to see that there's something like a copy of you out there who either has done the same and is flirting a couple of them, is just so strange. It feels like a disarmament of my achievements, like I am having countless stalkers.

I am mostly using facebook as a tool to really connect with my friends, who are all around the world, because I have lived with them, they are part of my family, studied with them, partied with them or in a few cases, chatted with them.

Many layers of friends go into facebook, it's like a projection of my life. I have some friends in farangland who said they quitted it because they spent too much time on it, I couldnt!

Just one thing, I want to warn you all. It is SO EASY to find information about you on facebook, who you hang out with, what you think, where you live, your phone number, your blog, your email, your preferences, your flirts etc

My advice is: do not put too much of your info out there, you may regret it when someone finds out:)