I wouldn't go so far as to say the author or his 'friends' are misusing Facebook - they can use it however they please. But people with massive numbers of friends are going to break whatever expectation there was of nearby members of the network being meaningful.
For those of us less entwined with social networks, our 'friends' are actually our friends, and family, colleagues, neighbours and people we know through shared interests. The friends of our friends will be likewise, with a perfectly good chance we will have things in common with them, together with a few distant links that could provide interesting or unexpected connections. It can be a useful network.
Of course, Facebook has been complicit in every development that has made it more general and less a reflection of our real social networks - as it has tried to acquire every person as a user. There is a conflict between a social network that tries to be a more convenient form of your real-life social networks, and a 'social network' that is trying to be the whole Internet.
For those of us less entwined with social networks, our 'friends' are actually our friends, and family, colleagues, neighbours and people we know through shared interests. The friends of our friends will be likewise, with a perfectly good chance we will have things in common with them, together with a few distant links that could provide interesting or unexpected connections. It can be a useful network.
Of course, Facebook has been complicit in every development that has made it more general and less a reflection of our real social networks - as it has tried to acquire every person as a user. There is a conflict between a social network that tries to be a more convenient form of your real-life social networks, and a 'social network' that is trying to be the whole Internet.