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Did You Write Happy Birthday …

… on Facebook today. I did. In fact, I wrote it for eight people. I wrote slightly different messages for each person, and especially customized my messages for those I know the best. On the other hand, for those I didn’t know as well, my message was less customized. I didn’t have anything funny or exciting to write. And finally, there was one person whose wall I didn’t write on yet. The million dollar question is: what does this all really mean?

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about happy birthday message on Facebook. This is especially true now that I am in business school, where the number of Facebook friends is higher than ever before. Not only do you get “Friends” from classes but you also find alumni, classmates’ significant others, professors, and friends of classmates who become friends. And then you mix in the fact that I’m in both the JD and the MBA program.

But how can you write happy birthday to all of them?

Today it’s still “fairly” easy with my current set of “friends” but it’s not seamless. And at some point, it will get difficult. One day, maybe impossible. And if I want to ensure that it’s not impossible then I’ll have to become more standard and less creative. It’s the only way you handle 25 birthday messages in a day, let alone 40 or 50.

On the other hand, what if you don’t write on their Wall at all. Does it matter? Will they notice that you didn’t write and secretly hold it against you? Will they decide not to write on your wall if they see you on your birthday? And even worse, will it be one step toward the person de-friending you on Facebook?

I don’t know the answer to these questions. In fact, I hadn’t thought of any of them until today, while I was writing happy birthday, which led to this post.

But what I do know is that Facebook is becoming busier than ever before. The average number of “Friends” is increasing more than ever. And the number of people that share birthdays is also more common.

At some point, we’ll all have to decide how to handle it. How busy we want to become with our message. When we should stop writing “happy birthday”? Should we just cap our number of friends? Or perhaps even pull the plug on Facebook entirely?

No matter which option you decide, you wouldn’t be the first person I know who chose it.