Several of my best friends and family members are not on Facebook. It’s their right, I suppose, to be ANTI-Facebook. Maybe they want to stick it to Mark Zuckerberg or maybe they think it’s a waste of time (to see what your friends you have lost touch with are up to and how many cute kids they have and whether or not your ex aged as well as you did and what happened to that guy who was in your class in third grade) or maybe they just don’t know how to use it (MOM), but, honestly, they need to get their asses on Facebook. It’s not COOL to not be on Facebook. For real, it’s not.

“Ali! I feel like I have absolutely no idea what’s going on in your life?”

Wait. WHAT? Really?

I mean, come on. I am public. I mean, you can google my name and all sorts of fun stuff comes up. If you want to know what I ate for lunch today, what was said in my office today, what color sweater I am wearing today and what time I showed up for carpool, that information is at your fingertips. It’s almost harder to NOT know what’s going on in my life than to know. I am an open blog book.

“Oh, daughter of mine? Can you do me a favor? When you cut your son’s hair ALL OFF, can you please make sure that you send me a picture of it so I don’t have to find out from my friends who found out from Facebook?”

Wait. WHAT? Really?

I mean, come on. I am at the salon. I take a picture with my iphone. I quickly twitpic and send to Facebook. In seconds, everyone near and dear to me is all, “Oh my god! Where did his hair go? He looks like a different person! I love it! I hate it! Just when I thought he couldn’t get any cuter!” Facebook and Twitter are just a fantastic way to share important information with a lot of people at one time. It was the easiest way to tell people that my father was in the hospital and that I was rushing off to Atlanta.

140 characters or less tells you exactly what you need to know.

Obviously, it’s also a good way to share completely useless information too, such as the fact that I want to own a pair of cowboy boots and that someone at my son’s birthday party thinks that Indianapolis is a country in Asia and that I can’t stop watching shows about little and that I really want to see that Burlesque movie or that I used a black sharpie on the heels of my black boots and that cows cannot vomit and that I cannot handle people who wear their Blackberries in holsters.

It’s a good way to share all the pictures I take. It’s a good way to share all the places I go, and all the places I am planning to go. It’s a good way to share the super cool things I am doing at work.

My mother doesn’t know any of this information.

My best friends don’t know any of this information.

And that’s not cool. Not at all.