Facebook And The 5 Thousand Friends

I am looking forward to the future when all the facebook mysteries, the tales of misplaced correspondence, the Kicked-Off-Due-To-5 Thousand-Friends, all the separations due to someone’s worlds of communication being shattered into too many thousands of splintered ‘hellos,’ will someday be told.
The old days of a small collective seem to have twittered away. Or maybe they can be regained, once the heavy weight of friendship is off our backs. I chose to do mine in small armies, friending everyone of a certain name till a small army grew up that I thought of fondly, protectively as a force. How startling to have proof that the name you thought was yours alone, belongs to a great number of individuals with tastes and desires greatly different from your own but equally fierce possessors of the same name.
Whatta small psychological suggestion this facebook is! All these strangers, strangers still but lulled into unawareness of that fact. All the nonexisting gifts being given, nonstatus being attained, bits of self being revealed.
Who has yet to explain the facebook phenomena and its social impact? What has it done to our worlds? And those outside, how truly outside they seem; uncomprehending, plodding along their same pathways, encountering all the usual pathos and pain of the real world while facebookers seem to have some sort of immunity in these psychological kingdoms where they are small gods surrounded by all the other small gods who went out and got their 5 thousands.
What IS it, this thing only made possible through contemporary electronics? Does it have any meaning at all? How far out of the real world does it push us? How much real time does it take?
There we swim, side by side, those convinced that venturing on to the computer in any form will instantly compromise their identities; that they will be stolen and used around the world while around them swim those to whom the computer is their own warm pool. And with these, the possessors of the ‘5-Thousand-And-Off-Friend’s, feeling they are queen or king of some small, nonexisting kingdoms to which they now invite their ‘fans.’
Is it all a vast psychological experiment by some unrevealed university department? What kind of effect will it have on the generations who tumbled in? Is it over yet? Is Google Buzz the replacement, our promised land? Will this yet unexplained phenomena take over time and mind , consuming years down the road? Or has it linked the whole world up, giving me commonality with those who tweet to tell me we have 365 ‘friends’ in common, none of whose names come readily to mind?
Have I been too busy online to keep up with those I love in the real world?