Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Crunching My Facebook Numbers

April 21, 2015
Day 356

It took me a long time to prepare today's blog, because I had to do a lot of counting.

First I counted how many family members I was connected to on Facebook (35), and thought how surprisingly low that number was.  Then I counted the number of people I've met through work, past and present (38), and that number made sense.  Next I counted how many people I was friends with through Billy Elliot (86), which I'd always suspected was a high number, and it really is, especially considering I've got "only" 335 Facebook friends.

After all that, I counted how many people I've known since high school or before, and was only slightly surprised to see the number was so low (12).  The number of people I've known since college or just afterward, basically from the age of 18 to 24, was even lower (7), but that makes more sense, because that was the time I was in the religious life, and many of my friends just after that time either disowned me or we just mutually lost touch.

The number of people I'm connected to on Facebook who I met through Andy is pretty low (9), but the number of people I'm connected to because of the Long Island GLBT community is high (30).

Finally, after crunching all of those numbers, I did two more searches through my friends list... 

Of my 335 Facebook friends, there are only 25 I've not yet met in person.  (That says a lot about how closed I've traditionally kept my Facebook, even though so many of my posts are public now.) 

And of my 335 Facebook friends, 59 of them I met online before I met them in person.  Some were guys I met for dates who later became friends, some were Billy Elliot fan friends I knew online before meeting in person, some were Long Island GLBT community people, and one was Andy.

Whew!  These numbers aren't exact in every case, I'd bet, because I moved fairly quickly through my list each time I made a new count, but they're pretty close.  It's a good list for me to have, and I suspect a very helpful list to look back on years from now too.

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