First, a little background: I've always considered myself forward thinking. Way back in high school, I was the first girl to take mechanical drawing. (It was the only "art" related class at our school. Yes, it was that long ago.) We bought our first desktop computer before desktop computers were common on office desktops. My husband tinkers with all kinds of gadgets and built and rebuilt so many electronic things (including computers) around the house that I've lost track. I used the first generation of MS FrontPage, and my first web page dates back almost 15 years.

But I just couldn't get into social networking.

It's not that I'm anti-social. While our then-teenage daughter set up Xanga pages and wriggled her way around every block we put on MySpace, social networks just didn't appeal to me. Maybe it was the hype over pedators and cyberbullying. Maybe I didn't think I had that much to share. Who knows. (Not me!)

My first Facebook account died from lack of interest. But I managed to set up a new account a few months and so far, it's been a much better experience. I figured out a couple of tricks that have made it much more interesting and useful:

1. Privacy settings are your friend! The settings link is in the upper right corner under "Settings." I don't have the controls locked down as tight as they could be, but they are available if needed.
2. Silly application requests can be ignored. You know... the ones where someone invites you to be their "top friend" or "gives" you a flower or some trinket. I click the ignore option on just about everything. In fact, my list of blocked applications is almost two screens long!
3. Success is not measured by how many friends you have. It's tempting to accept every friend request you get. I've ignored quite a few requests and deleted some friends when I realized that I didn't really know them, just added them when we crossed paths online somewhere.

To be honest, my Facebook success came after I got more comfortable with a couple of other social networking tools: Twitter and StumbeUpon. They are now integrated into my Facebook account, and I even know how to send a picture from my cell phone to my Facebook photo album.

From what I see, it looks like more of us Boomers are shuffling into Facebook... which, I think, is pretty cool despite all the kids saying it's not!