Before Edgerank it was handy to keep in touch with more distant contacts, as you say. Now it's frankly damaging to friendships. Many people I'd once have been

Before Edgerank it was handy to keep in touch with more distant contacts, as you say. Now it's frankly damaging to friendships. Many people I'd once have been on a phone call with once every 3 or 6 months now "keep it to facebook" and barely talk. Edgerank ensures you no longer see those updates from those distant contacts reliably. Now it's a low budget reality show - over sharing of wonderful or terrible lives - far removed from those people's actual lives. Sharing of politics, grinding axes, in the place of actually doing something, and endless memes. It's the low budget replacement of friendships, but I genuinely don't understand the point or attraction of the new incarnation. For the most part (there are a few exceptions of people who talk on Facebook regularly) I have gone back to emailing and phone friends, and they do similar.