Having lost -- I think? -- a friend whom I had before the advent of "friend me on FB," I can tell you there are more ambiguous, stranger ways to lose a friend,

Having lost -- I think? -- a friend whom I had before the advent of "friend me on FB," I can tell you there are more ambiguous, stranger ways to lose a friend, and they involve not finding out. I don't actually know he's dead. I only know that none of our mutual friends have heard from him, and that he was fighting with almost-certainly-terminal cancer to begin with. The supremely interconnected world of social media has certainly created problems. But there are other circumstances that people don't understand as well, situated some time between "all we have is the postal service" and "all we had was email" that don't even give you the closure of an obviously-defunct Facebook account or the direct reassurance of other friends/relatives. Many people here might not realize that before this sort of issue there was an entirely different one, and it ends with... well, it doesn't end. Which is really the problem.