All the friends I need?

From one of my Internet contacts came the question:
"You don't have a Facebook account, do you?".

You cannot live in the modern digital world without a Facebook account? My wife wants one but we need to resolve the issues of having a Thai keyboard first, as mostly it would be a way of keeping touch with people she knows there - her sister and former university friends usw.

I had a Facebook account for about 3 months a few years ago. I dropped it for 3 reasons:

1. People were starting to put "poisoned links" (links attached to viruses) on it. The IT specialist (that I still want to be) objected to the mediocre security that the site had, at least at the time. 
2. I was tired of running into recruitment "groups" (or wharrever Facebook calls them) for Fascist and neo-Fascist organisations. Freedom of speech may be one thing, the active recruitment of neo-Nazis is summat that I find extremely distasteful, however.
3. The strange friend requests, like the dark-skinned Australian woman whose request I reluctantly accepted and who had turned into a Caucasian male by the following morning. Some people may find the joke funny, for me it is a complete waste of time.

Eventually I am an old man, not a teenager, so having that many friends anyway is not important to me. Really my need for contacts now wherever is as much a question of practicality as anything - a way (any way) of increasing my mediocre income in particular, and not through scams thank you!

Don't get me wrong - I am fully appreciative of the good Internet friends that I have made around the world through sites like MyLot, and at times they help keep me sane (and remind me occasionally that I do get things wrong!), but the urgent problems are financial and with the next international financial crisis that future President Romney and his party are absolutely certainly going to bring the rest of the world sooner rather than later (plus a very expensive war with Iran that, as with his mentor  Bush and Iraq, will probably not be paid for!), I need to get some financial resolutions now.

I cannot recall whether it was a Charles Schulz quote, or a MAD magazine spoof on Peanuts, but I remember the quote attributed to Charlie Brown being: "I need all the friends that I can get".

When you are younger success is counting just how many friends you have. When you get older, quality is the important factor. Two of the closest friends that I had in my life have died in recent years for example and they were quality people - people whose loss you simply cannot replace. 20 more acquaintances on an international website - how much quality will that bring? Maybe there is someone out there who can provide something really positive though.

I still for the moment see summat like LinkedIn being more the solution than Facebook. But then how many friends do I really need?

Postscript (December 27th, 2021), of course we didn't get Romney as President, so the forecasts proved inaccurate - but they still reflected what possibly have gone wrong if that had occurred.