Who do I know on Facebook?

I warned my college aged children that I was setting up a facebook account at work.  They both told me not to try to “friend” them.  It made me laugh.

Setting up the account was easy.  I explored the profile information options and the privacy settings.  It would be nice to be able to see the profile as you choose information to be posted and which level of security to apply to different sections.  That way you could see what the public profile looked like as you made your choices.  As it is, I found myself trying something and then switching to the profile to see if I liked my choices.

After setting up the account, I tried a few family names (guess who I looked up first?), school alumni groups and a few subjects.  It was amazing to find that within 5 minutes of setting up the account, facebook had a list of 25 or so people who had one or more tags similar to mine.  Even more remarkable was the fact that three were high school classmates of mine and one was a former next door neighbor.  The school classmate finds were interesting too as I had listed only the school, not the year of graduation – of course facebook does have a record of my birthdate……..

I haven’t had time to explore the search capabilities of facebook.  During my next visit I’d like to see if I can limit the number of “Ruth Whitney” hits by location or some other characteristic.  It made me wonder about an institutional facebook account and what we would like to name it and how we would like to be “found” by facebook users.