Thanks for All the Birthday Wishes, Facebook

Yesterday was my 36th birthday. My birthday used to be an event that passed between Christmas and New Year's unnoticed and only occassionally remembered by friends and family. AKA: Worst birthday ever. But now in an era of social networking, I-- like hundreds of millions of others-- am now flooded with birthday wishes. Absolutely innundated.

That's a huge shift in a short period of time. It's sort of amazing when you stop to think about it. 

More amazing than the sheer number of "Happy Birthdays!" is the range of people they came from. I'm paging through several pages of wall posts on Facebook and everyone from cousins I haven't seen in more than a decade, to my kindergarten best friend, to a coworker from five jobs ago, to my brother's ex, to everyone I've ever come across in the tech industry-- there they all are, wishing me happy birthday, in bizarre juxtoposition to one another. It's like my own episode of "This is your life Sarah Lacy" captured in birthday wishes. 

A cynic could say that the friction points being taken out of wishing someone happy birthday make it less special somehow. That those little things that used to thwart birthday wishes like having to remember it was someone's birthday, being organized enough to call or send a card on that day, having that person's contact information up-to-date to begin with-- these were obstacles that you worked to overcome if you truly care.

Get used to this kind of thing. With Facebook finally going public next year, there's going to be a raft of haters on the company, and endless stories about how its eroding relationships, killing our privacy, drowning puppies. Blah, blah, blah.

It's not that those haters don't have a point. A lot of the people wishing me happy birthday wouldn't have in a non-Facebook world. But I'd argue, even if the message of each wish is a little diluted, the sheer volume of those wishes more than makes up for it.

If you stop and think about the level of intense connection Facebook has enabled in the world, it's pretty mind-boggling. It's happened so gradually and is such a constant in our lives that we already take it for granted. You literally never have to lose touch with someone if you don't want to. That's a massive change in the nature of human relationships in just a matter of years. It was no less remarkable than when people were first able to see politicians on television, or able to call anyone, anywhere with a mobile phone, or have the world's information at their fingertips.

Facebook feels like it's taken an ice-age to make it to the public markets, but in terms of broader societal impact we're only seeing the beginning of what it means.