[temphn]

Yes, probably so. Facebook means that you can keep up with people (who's getting married, who moved, who had children) without emailing them.

If you have 500 friends, each with a feed with 50 posts, you are talking about 25000 possible emails. Those emails would never be sent, because they are usually individually way below the importance threshold for an email.

So, by this calculation at least, it's at least a 1-2 order of magnitude reduction in the work required to maintain contact with old friends. That's valuable.

[ericd]

That's assuming that knowing the minutiae of the lives of people who you don't talk to frequently is important. I'd say that that's actually a huge waste of time, and distracts from actual socializing by making you feel like you're keeping up with people without actually doing so.

[jamesteow]

Hear hear.

When G+ came out I dropped my Facebook account.

Due to the low activity on G+, I resorted to... doing stuff with other people in real life, such as volunteering and going to meetups.com meetups. And my real friends not near me kept in touch via e-mail and IM.