Does Facebook really help us to connect with people and form stronger relationships with all of our “friends” on Facebook?  After looking at everyone’s Facebook page in our class (sorry for a little Facebook stalking), the combined number of Facebook friends is right around 10,000.  Fifteen of us really can have a combined 10,000 friends? To me, this shows how Facebook has grown an absurd amount since it was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, and it is clearly not a way for people to have intimate “friendships” on this social networking site.  Granted, everyone is obviously Facebook friends with their closest friends in real life so this is the rare example of a meaningful Facebook friendship, but other than that, I am sure people who have a thousand friends or more rarely ever talk to half of them, maybe even more.  I know this is certainly true for me.  I feel like I would accept a friend request from anyone who I went to high school with, and now that we are at Princeton I accept friend requests from anyone on the Princeton network, even if I don’t know them well at all.  It is very hard to say reject a friend request.  If you think about it this way, Facebook stalking isn’t really a sketchy thing at all, rather what Facebook is all about.  I know that countless times throughout the day when my news feed is refreshed, stories about people who I haven’t talked to in years comes up and every once in a while I check out the person’s profile and see what they have been up to, where they go to school, if they’re in a relationship, etc.  In this way, Facebook does help us connect with people and stay up to date with what our peers, old friends, and other are up to in their lives, but Facebook certainly is not a way to form stronger relationships with people anymore, seeing as that is has exploded and is used by 500 million people around the world.  This translates to 1 in 13 people, an incredible percentage of the population that is using this social networking site.  It is much more than a place to share information with friends.  At this point, all of Facebooks users are sharing their information with the world.  To me, as I’m sure many people agree, this is a very scary thing to be so exposed in todays technological world.