Sure, if I really, really, really cared about my friends, I would practice calligraphy, hand-make my own paper, and train a flock of messenger birds to deliver them.

But there's a lot I want to get done, and a lot of people I'd like to keep in touch with, so if there is a decent way to do so that is more efficient than the 14th-century technology that I could use, then I'm going to use it.

If you have aesthetic objections to new-fangled things like the telegraph, the horseless carriage, and Facebook, by all means don't use 'em. But don't go pissing in other people's soup just because you don't approve of the dish they ordered.

No doubt it indeed has replaced email and IM for some people, but I would think it is just because "well, everyone else is on facebook so I'll just use that too"...

It's better than e-mail because I don't have to sift through spam in my private message box. I don't even have to sift through messages from companies that I technically have a business relationship with. I only get actual personal contacts.

It's better than various forms of IM software because (1) most of my relatives actually use it and (2) it's in the browser rather than a standalone client.

Of course, YMMV.

Mind, I don't use FB, or trust it, for this.

For my tech-savvy parents and non-tech-savvy grandparents, it provides an easy way to share/view photos. Using email/IM means having to come up with some sort of filing system for photos, whereas Facebook just provides it, along with captions which can be useful for travel albums.

It's a broadcast system with less urgency than email. If there's some photos or a story from daily life you want to share, emails like that will get lost in an overload of tasks and requests. IMs are easy to ignore and hard to dig up. Facebook provides a way to find out that hey, something interesting happened, and when I get around to it I can browse what's up with people I care about.

  Necrophiliac bestiality

Not my personal opinion, just a translation of what I think he's saying.

As an aside, there's the famous line from Woody Allen's What's Up Tiger Lilly? : "I'd call him a sadistic, hippophilic necrophile, but that would be beating a dead horse."

"My helo-elephant is the _only_ peanut powered mode of transportation with automatic mouse avoidance!" True, perhaps, but when someone asks why you need a helo-elephant it's often not informative to just say what it does with more words... they're often looking for you to justify why you need to do those things (or do those things at once).

How many times in your life have you moved house to somewhere far away? What you wrote here makes it sound like it probably wasn't very much.

My whole family uses Facebook for keeping up with people we don't live near anymore. I use it for keeping up with college friends whom I don't live near anymore (moving across the state will do that, let alone moving halfway across the world).

You might ask, why am I keeping up with college friends? The answer is: because I'm 23, so they're still a large fraction of all the friends I have.

As I recall, there was a rather frightening New York Times article once posted to HN on how even decades after college, most people still haven't made that many new friends to replace their friends from adolescence.

Scary stuff, hence: Facebook.

Facebook is not endowed with some unique magical distance busting power. Telephone, Email, IM, public websites, and postal mail all work over long distances just as well.

No, what Facebook does have is broadcasting capabilities. Rather than going through 13 tedious phone calls, I can post one status update. Unlike email, I don't have to specifically include or exclude various relations from the list of people I'm writing to. It contains its own IM service (though my fiancee and I use Skype together). It's far faster than postal mail (like everything else electronic). It costs far less than a personal website with forum software running.

It's a local optimum. Not supremely perfect, not magical, but good at what it does.