John Murray, I'm sorry to hear that you have had a horrible year last year. I'm even sorry to hear that you have only had mostly encounters with fake people on

John Murray, I'm sorry to hear that you have had a horrible year last year. I'm even sorry to hear that you have only had mostly encounters with fake people online. When the telephone was invented, nobody thought that the phone was eventually going to become the end to face-to-face meeting. Nothing will replace meeting IRL. The internet and social media is just like the telephone, it is one tool out of many. I also don't know where you find all these perfect people with perfect lives as your facebook friends. I have few facebook friends (less than 300) but they are all genuine and legitimate friends and I do interact with them and they do (all) provide some value to me by having this online connection. And no, their lives are not perfect. I have a friend who works on an oil rig. I can't just call him up and ask if I could pop over. But we have lots of things to talk about. I like his photography and he likes some articles that I post. We can email each other but MANY other people enjoy his photos and my curation. My family lives in 5 different time zones. We almost never get to have a 5 way video skype at the same time. Cellphones, texting, social media provides with the closest to real-time updates of my family. Once in a blue moon, we hit jackpot and get everybody to conference together. That rarely happens. We have individual emails but it's so much easier to share photos, videos and stuff like that on social media. Not just to share all the good stuff that happens, but also the not so good stuff. I like to travel and make new friends (in real life), and we used to write emails to each other but you don't write emails to each other every day/week. And its so hard to like write your life summary once every few months especially when events already passed. My Greek friends are NOT having perfect lives at all. They keep me updated with the protests and riots that happen around Athens, about the economy and politics over there. This is not merely news from the media, these are genuine legitimate friends of mine. Another friend of mine is a young Chicago native who quit his corporate job to travel and is currently volunteering in Nepal. He builds schools and libraries for kids. Recently he met a boy who needed heart surgery but his family could not afford it, so he used his connections via social media, to ask his own friends to help raise some money for this boy. We're not just internet friends, we're friends in real life, we know him and trust him. So now this boy got his heart surgery did. In closing, I concur with your last statement. Facebook can be the beginning but don't let it become the end. Certainly! I can't wait to be reunited with my family and friends from all over the world and hear all about everything in more details. Facebook serves as little bookmarks to keep tabs on everyone until I get a chance to. As long as you don't add a bunch of random people, having lots of legit friends on social media is certainly not going to 'kill' you. Best wishes