The crux of the essay is the following:<p>> Facebook keeps me connected to folks I care deeply about who aren’t nearby.<p>As soon as I saw it, I said to myself: "boy oh boy, he better give some hard evidence." The article goes on even without providing <i>anecdotal</i> evidence, let alone anything to the extent I was expecting or hoping. In fact, the entire discussion seems to be about the hiding feature. Yeah, everyone knows about it (and more and more people are using it), but I'm not sure how using a destructive feature of a service makes the service <i>more</i> necessary (I would argue for the opposite). If I hide 90% of my "friends" from my feed, for example, what's the point of Facebook? Apart from the ego-boosting friend-count (which I might also hide).<p>Now, going back to the initial (bolded!) argument: <i>Facebook keeps me connected to folks I care deeply about who aren’t nearby.</i> I think that this is just simply not true. Of course, a definition of "care deeply" would be needed, but my assumption here is that we're talking about moms, dads, sisters, brothers, aunts, BFFs, and the like -- NOT ex-girlfriends/boyfriends or classmates from high school that helped us out that one time on that one biology project in freshman year. If I only contacted my mom or dad through Facebook, my parents would first of all be quite mad -- and second of all, our relationship would suffer. People that I <i>care deeply</i> about get emails, phone calls, Skype calls, text messages, sometimes even snail-mail from me! I'm not sure how the OP expects us to connect Facebook to "caring deeply." Again, some evidence (or an actual argument) would've been nice.<p>I don't hate Facebook, but more often than not, I find myself just using it when I'm bored and semi-creeping around seeing what X or Y is up to and randomly clicking on that "cute girl that's a friend of a friend of a friend" (incidentally, this is what most people use it for). "Creeping on Facebook," has in fact, become a relatively common colloquialism; I wouldn't even attribute a negative quality to the idea, but I <i>would</i> argue it's a fundamental failure of FB (and something that should capitalize on). I posted about this before, but I really believe that the next "big social thing" will be a start-up that will somehow make it easy to approach people you don't know and spark up a conversation. There are <i>so many</i> people on FB, and yet most of us hide 90% of the people we're friends with and we don't add the ones we might find interesting but don't know. That doesn't seem "just fine" to me.<p>Oh yeah, go ahead and add me on Facebook.