Just a few weeks ago I was checking out my feed on my phone at lunch and saw a post from an old friend I hadn't talked to in years saying he was visiting town for a few days. I sent him a message and we ended up hanging out one night that week, and we had a blast.

Or, last year, there was an old friend who'd seen one of my updates pop up in her feed, and decided to send me a quick message to see what I was up to these days. We ended up talking and hanging out quite a bit, and now she's become one of my closer friends, after we had drifted out of touch for years due to moving away.

Without Facebook, would we have been on each other's email list or blog or whatever non-social-network method of sharing info? Probably not.

Those aren't the only things it's done for me, either -- and just two days ago I got another one of those sorts of messages, though it's too early to know if anything more than a quick "oh here's what I'm up to these days, how about you" exchange will come of it. But I think even that's worthwhile.

I'm also not particularly concerned about them having cookied me and learning a bunch of sites I've visited through that. There it's mostly a numbers thing -- out of all the millions of users, I'm not too worried about someone deciding to try to hassle me with my info somehow. Compare that risk with how easy it's made it to reconnect with all those old friends.

(I'll talk about the nightmare scenario of this post in a separate comment, this is just meant to illustrate the positives vs the current negatives.)

> What do I get from Facebook that I don't get from "analog" social interaction

An easily maintained wide network of shallow relationships which is extremely useful when looking for a job, or something to do on Friday night, or the fourth person to split the costs of gas when going to a larger event... Basically, it allows you to spam people you barely know in a socially-acceptable manner.

Benefits of a network like that may be far greater than a small group of trusted friends. I'm not on Facebook because of its creepy/stalkery vibe but there is value there, probably a lot of it.

The advantage for me at least is volume. In online interaction you can connect with a large number of people at once. For example, it's easy to carry a chat conversation with 2 or 3 people whereas in real life you'd need to actually have everyone in the same room, interested in the same topic, etc. Of course the trade off is usually depth (and as you mentioned, privacy) so it's not always the best thing. But it is very helpful for short updates with people you don't talk to otherwise.