What came first — the friend or Facebook?

Darleene Powells's Facebook profile One should be able to answer that question easily but its apparently getting harder to answer that question definitively. I stumbled onto this interesting article from Time magazine about whether Facebook is replacing face time with friends or not via Yahoo. Now, you would think, since we’re spending so much time on Facebook, we’re not really spending a whole lot of time with people in the flesh. But, seeing as how our lives are so hectic that we feel lost if we accidentally leave our phones at home, maybe Facebook is actually keeping us connected.

Enter Facebook, which provides a constant flow of information via short updates from everyone a user knows: a distant cousin is glad he skipped the cheeseburger chowder; a colleague has a new book is on sale; a close friend is engaged or newly single. Jenny and I, along with three of our childhood pals from Saratoga Springs, N.Y., learned that a dear old friend had ended her seven-year relationship through a Facebook status change. We expressed dismay, albeit through Facebook’s IM feature, that we had to learn such potent information in this impersonal way.

I’ve actually been wondering lately about Facebook posts and how you could actually tell a lot about what a person posts. But it tends to annoy me when people post their own work or blog posts on Facebook — until I started doing it myself. Is it annoying? Anyone want to weigh in on this?