Days after the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals announced plans to close Martha's Vineyard's only animal shelter, Heather Jardin created a "Save The Martha's Vineyard MSPCA" page on Facebook. There was an immediate reaction. As of early this week, Ms. Jardin reports, more than 2,000 members had signed on as friends of the site.
Five years after its start, Facebook, a social networking website initially designed for college students, has an estimated 175 million users of all ages worldwide, and that number is growing, according to industry watchers.
As more and more adults take to web-based social life, the odds increase daily that adult users will find someone they know on Facebook - a former girlfriend, a high school chum, or a new or old office colleague.
Looking for an easy way to stay up to date on his classmates' lives, Harvard student Mark Zuckerburg created Facebook in 2004. It became a global phenomenon after sweeping across college and high school campuses nationwide.
Facebook adapts well to the Vineyard's "village" lifestyle. Islanders use Facebook to connect to other Islanders - sometimes people they see or talk to on a regular basis and, beyond that, people they may know, but not that well.
Martha's Vineyard, with a year-round population slightly smaller than Northeastern University in Boston, could be viewed as a large campus. Some Islanders use Facebook in the same way that Katie Mayhew and her classmates do - to form local networks that allow them to see activities and comments of neighbors and acquaintances they've invited into their circle of close and not-so-close friends.
Since nonprofits, event promoters, and businesses are welcome to create pages, Island organizations are catching on, putting up pages for their cause, commercial interest, or special event.
The community building function of Facebook has also been used to post late-breaking Island news. When the Codding family house burned last month, the news was posted on Facebook within hours. The next day, Facebook member (FBer) John O'Toole created a new page. "I started a Facebook group named "Helping the Coddings," and made a logo for it," says Mr. O'Toole. "Islanders tuned right into it. I sent out invitations to everybody on my friends list that was an Islander that would know them. And they sent it to their friends." The group now has 300 members. From there, FBers Joe Keenan, Brad Tucker, and Orlaith Estes began to plan a benefit - and one way they spread the word was on Facebook.
Facebook is controversial. Recently, Facebook, the corporation, claimed rights to all information that users post - forever. A storm of outrage followed. Facebook recently invited users to debate and comment on use decisions.
"The Honesty Box" is a popular Facebook mini-application that many high school users download. It allows the poster to send an anonymous message to someone else. While many of the posts are positive or innocuous - "I have a crush on you!" or "Your hair is so nice!" - some have been linked to cases of cyber-bullying and harassment.
Lastly, like computer games and web-surfing, FBers may find it hard to tear themselves away from the screen and return to non-cyber lives. Many users, students and adults alike, are divided as to whether FB is a relaxing pleasure or an addictive distraction.
An Island Facebook user who preferred to remain anonymous, commented on its addictive nature: "Much of the networking is good - community-building, etc., but much more of it, for me, can be an addiction: clicking the refresh button to see if anyone has responded to my 'brilliance' yet, monitoring my friend count. All the injured inner-child behaviors. Does anyone like me?"
