8 Reasons I Love Reconnecting on Facebook ...

Old friends pop up everywhere on Facebook. They might be recommended or you might see them posting on a mutual friend's wall. You may not want to find all of them, necessarily, but odds are that you're really happy to reconnect with many of them. And with Facebook, you can easily get caught up, whether you keep it on the site or take it offline – you know, into the real world.

What I enjoy is making friends with people I used to know but wasn't necessarily close to before. For instance, I recently reconnected with my old stand partner from band, and promptly decided that we were going to be BFFs. Freddie, also known as Leroy, and I weren't not close in high school, but we only had the one class together and it's hard to talk when the both of you either have your noses buried in books or are blowing away on trombones. There were minor chats while we emptied our spit valves, but now we randomly bug each other on AIM and it is full of awesome sauce.

Facebook, frankly, also makes it easy to keep those casual friends at a distance. You may not want to spend a lot of time emailing back and forth or talking on the phone, but you don't want to totally ignore them either. So, a comment here, a like there, a wall post somewhere else – you can continue to keep your friendship nice but casual, which is always a plus.

I confess. I am sometimes an awful gossip hound. I like to know what's going on with the people I used to know, and okay, sometimes I talk about it. Facebook lets me keep up on it all without really getting involved, though, so I can make the random humorous observation but there's no real hassle about getting pulled into what's going on – which actually involves a category all its own, as you shall see.

I like the fact that Facebook is sort of anonymous. What I mean is that, you may be friends with people on there because you'd feel guilty about not being friends with them. Ahem. That has happened to me on occasion. Anyway, you can catch up with them while still keeping things anonymous, so if you don't want to share every detail about your life, you can keep some things to yourself.

Facebook drama abounds, but it's pretty easy to avoid it if you're careful. I use Facebook for fun, and while I'm sympathetic if the two girls I went to high school with who were BFFs are now in a ginormous fight, I am of the opinion that it is no longer high school and I typically have enough drama of my own without having to share in the drama of people I haven't seen in over ten years. I will, however, enjoy reading about it!

Back to that whole “I feel guilty about not accepting your friend request” bit, Facebook's privacy settings make it easy to deal with that. Like, I am friends with some people who I know don't see things the way I do – and that's cool, we're all different and we all have different opinions. You're not right, I'm not right, our opinions are simply right for us. So if I'm posting something I know someone wouldn't agree with, I will just casually block them from seeing that post. That way they're not uncomfortable, and I don't have to deal with any lectures.

Sometimes, sad as it is, you do lose touch with family members. That's happened to me, generally with people I really love, but they've moved, and I've moved, the years pass, and we just lost touched. I've found a lot of them on Facebook, though, and it's really wonderful reconnecting with them and seeing how they've been and what they've been doing.

So, here's to old friends on Facebook and new friends found courtesy of Facebook! Anything that can bring people together can't be all bad. If you're on FB, what's your favorite thing about it?

Top Photo Credit: Megandavid