Excellent points throughout. Strongly agree with all of them. >Maybe not knowing more about our cousins or our friend's friends is a sort of social lubricant.

Excellent points throughout. Strongly agree with all of them. >Maybe not knowing more about our cousins or our friend's friends is a sort of social lubricant. It's easier to be polite to my bigoted grandfather at Thanksgiving if I don't have daily reminders of his racism and homophobia This has actually been how I connect to my friends lately, haha. I ask them what they've been upto, and they mostly go "you know, the same thing on facebook". And then they remember I'm not on facebook, so we go on hours and hours of heart-to-heart bringing up one another up to date with our lives. As the resident twitter fanboy (most of my karma comes from one pro-twitter comment), I couldn't agree with you more. To be fair though, twitter can be sometimes toxic too, but then I just mute the people and they fade from memory. Twitter feels more like the community I _want_ to be a part of, and facebook used to be the kind of community that I didn't particularly like (i.e, the facebooked version of my friends and family). I'll repeat what I say often on HN: the Twitter network/community makes me feel smarter and more excited about things in life. Facebook... never did. It made me want to gain the 'likes' (I wish they'd rename it to something less emotionally attached).