I was marking up this article in The Atlantic right on the Lexington Avenue bus, in front of everyone, that’s how well author Michael Hirschorn echoes my sentiments about Facebook. You don’t understand social networking? You will if you read this article. Hirschorn particularly hits the nail on the head in his descriptions, by contradistinction, of the anarchistic MySpace and the stiff LinkedIn. Excerpts:

The catchall term social media encompasses Web applications that allow individuals to create their own pages—filled with postings, photos, video, and portable applications generally called “widgets”—and interact with other users. The theory is that these networks will create a virtual environment in which like-minded people can find one another. In practice, as with Goldi­locks and the porridge, the gruel tends to be too hot or too cold. On MySpace, the flood of pseudo-buddies and marketing come-ons disguised as offers of friendship quickly becomes suffocating. Too hot. On a business – networking site like LinkedIn, the very nature of the concept becomes self-defeating: The subset of people you want to schmooze with and who want to schmooze with you is simply too small, and too difficult to separate from the much larger group of people you are trying to avoid or who are trying to avoid you. Too cold.

Facebook is getting the temperature just right, and in the process has been able to give social media real social capital. . . .

Openness and messiness are indeed the characteristics that make the Web so different from other forms of media, if indeed the Web can be called “media” at all. But it has always been the push-me/pull-you between order and disorder that has made the Internet more than merely a vast agglomeration of stuff. . . .

Facebook [] is imposing the right limits—it’s almost New Victorian in that regard. It is a connection engine that successfully mirrors how most of us want to live our lives. (Most people live in suburbs for a reason.) If the overall trend on the Internet is the individual user’s loss of control as corporations make money off information you unwittingly provide, Facebook is offering a way to get some of that control back.

Having said all that, I don’t spend all that much time on Facebook. The average age of members still seems to be in the “young enough to be my child” category, though everyone agrees it’s heading up fast. As Hirschorn points out, what makes the website so promising is that you can build your own networks within the overall network along any number of axes you choose, and make them open, closed, secret or, if you’re tech-savvy enough, in between. It’s good stuff — even if you don’t waste all your time on it.