I've been on Facebook for over a year now, and I thought it was pretty great that I could chat with people I hadn't seen in many years and reconnect with college buddies and high school friends after losing track. I've also been able to follow the exploits of some musicians and some authors, which is fun.

Some of my friends are really into posting either 1) status updates, or 2) photos, or 3) links. I'm not so much into posting any of the above, though I guess the one I do the most is post links - to blogs, to articles, to videos, to music, etc etc.

It's been an education seeing what my friends post, however. I've never been one to get into deep political discussions in social settings, but for a while I seemed to be getting into a lot of them a lot on Facebook. I'm amazed by how different many of my friends' world views are from my own. I've always considered myself to be middle-of-the-road with respect to most things, and open to both sides of issues. I'm repeatedly shocked by how limited some of their points of view are, how one sided. How much they just seem to want to find stuff that supports their world view, and how easily they dismiss anything that contradicts that point of view.

Sometimes I wonder how we all stayed friends. Then I think about the fact that we don't let "politics" get into our OWN social interaction. And they're mostly good people, I think.

Still, it's funny to see how different we can be.