Get out of my face (book)

Thought this was kind of amusing:

But it was the 2006 decision to open it up to the general public that drew howls from its original audience - and opened the door for the parental invasion.

In protest, several 'abolish parent' groups have sprung up on the site.

Yeamans and a few of his friends started "What Happens in College Stays in College: Keep Parents Off Facebook!" in 2007. They meant it partly as a joke but were stunned when more than 500 people signed on, each with a tale of parental intrusion.

Lily Goldberg, 17, a junior at Gaithersburg High School in Montgomery County, Md., said having parents on Facebook just seems weird.

"It's like having them walk into my room," she said.

Today, the fastest-growing segment of Facebook's estimated 66 million users are people 25 and older. More than half of the site's users are out of college. Whether that will have an impact on Facebook's coolness remains to be seen.

For a generation accustomed to sharing everything online, it might seem odd that two more pairs of eye would raise such concern. But Steve Jones, a professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago who has studied digital culture extensively, said there's a difference between the world and your parents. "What they want to keep most private is not something they wish to keep from strangers, it's the things they want to keep from people that know them," he said. "It's 'I don't care what someone who doesn't know me finds out. But I do care about what someone I know intimately (does).' "

My kids too young for facebook accounts but I did get a friend request from my aunty recently. I had a look at her profile and her 'friends' are her kids and me. She was always the kind of mother who tried very hard to be hip like her kids and boasted that she was more like a friend than a mother (not sure how her kids felt about this but one did rebel by throwing in her music studies and becoming a born-again Christian of the speaking in tongues variety). I decided against sending friend requests to teenagers I know (for example, the girl I tutored last year who also babysits for me) as I figured they probably wouldn't want an old fogey like me on their Facebook! In fact, they would probably prefer it if anyone over the age of 30 restricted their on-line networking to this site:

Pensionbookbig