During my Christmas break i noticed an interesting phenomenon… Over the past year due to Facebook I had stayed in touch with random people from high school that i had actually communicated very little with when i was in school. However some of my best friends from school were not active Facebook users and i was falling further out of touch with them each year. This was especially the case with the 4 friends who were closest to me during my formative years.
I started thinking deeper… and realized this was not just the case with my high school friends. This was the case with lots of different friends i’ve known over the years. If they were not active on Facebook I was losing touch with them. Due largely in part to the fact that i had completely fallen out of the habit of just randomly picking up the phone and calling someone. Even the act of randomly emailing someone i hadn’t seen in awhile had become very rare due to Facebook.
Shit! This is a major problem! I am losing touch with some of my closest friends (that don’t live here in Kiev) because they are not active on Facebook.
So i thought… What would solve this problem?
And i realized that there should be some type of personal CRM system that can connect fo Facebook and remind me that once or twice a year i should call my friends Marco, John, and Rafael. In fact it can send out an automatic invite to both of us each year becoming a pseudo-commitment to stay in touch over the long-term. For example, through the app I send an invite to Marco which says that we should call each other at least 1x every 3 months and it sends me a reminder to do this. This sort of breaks the social fear that your friend will answer the phone with ”uh…. why the hell are you calling me right now?”
In any case i’m not sure if this is the right solution but one thing is clear… Facebook is changing the way we communicate and making us lazier on the higher quality forms of staying in touch like telephone and writing personalized emails. And we need a powerful solution to fight this trend.
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Facebook is killing our ability to pick up the phone
