What happens if you throw a Facebook party and nobody comes? I like Facebook. I know some other people don't, but I do. It connects me to people I otherwise would have lost touch with.

It replaces the obligatory Christmas/holiday card that maintained connections in days of yore. It anchors new connections that otherwise might have drifted off on the tide.

And it takes a lot of the hassle out of organizing parties. Just create an event, choose the people you want to come and hit send. Invitees are then able to either ignore the invitation, say they're not coming, say they are coming or say they're maybe coming.

The problem is that by arranging our social world digitally, we've also created a raft of new social niceties. I've been arranging parties on Facebook for some time now and I've noticed some distinct trends.

The first party I had to invite maybe three-quarters of the people I wanted to come via email or other channels because they weren't on Facebook. The second time around, only half of the people weren't on Facebook.

This time around I didn't really bother contacting anyone who wasn't on Facebook. I'm not sure why; perhaps because they're so out of the Facebook loop they're not going to know what we're talking about.

Or maybe I can't bear to talk to people who lead such interesting lives they don't have time to join Facebook, let alone populate it with silly links and prodding applications.

But the real trend is in the way people consider their commitments. The first time around all the people who said on Facebook that they were coming, did.

The second one, one or two didn't make it. The third time around, less than half of those people who confirmed they were coming, actually did. Of the maybes, only two did.

Now admittedly, this was in a city renowned for its appalling traffic, and on a Friday, which is never a good day to get people out. But I'm not the only person to notice this disconnect.

One guy wrote in The New York Times about how he invited 700 of his Facebook friends that he only knew online to a bar in Toronto.

Fifteen said they would come. Sixty said maybe. One actually turned up. His lesson: "definitely attending" on Facebook means "maybe" and "maybe attending" means "likely not".

What intrigues me is how quickly this has happened. First off, we've accepted the idea of friendship with people we've never met.

In short, we've created two quite different worlds for ourselves -- online and offline. And, in the case of the Toronto guy, we've learned that these are not necessarily offline friendships in the making. They're a distinct group of people who only want to know you online. They're not interested in hooking up in the real world.

Then there's the other bit. In less than a year we've developed a whole new layer of social norms. A few months back, people applied the same rules to a Facebook invite that they would to an email or physical one.

Say you're coming if you really intend to come. Say no if you can't. But that has quickly morphed into something altogether less committed.

Perhaps the problem is the "maybe attending" option. Including that, perhaps, raises the idea in the attendee's mind that others may also be less than 100 percent committed and that the organizer is expecting a few dropouts?

Or maybe it's the fact that Facebook lets people see who else has vowed to attend, or maybe attend. That gives waverers a chance to mull whether the thing is worth attending, or even worth replying to.

Who knows. I'm sure social scientists are mulling this stuff over.

I personally think that all social norms were altered irreversibly with the arrival of the cell phone and SMS. Suddenly everyone found they didn't actually need to commit to a meeting until the last minute. Until then we had relied on communications systems that were not, well, reliable.

Smoke signals, writing in chalk on walls, letters, phone calls to landlines. We'd set up our appointments and then know that getting out of them would involve disruption. We'd have had to lose a body part or two to justify bailing.

Mobile phones allowed us to sneak out of commitments, or make fresh ones, on the spur of the moment. Facebook has now taken that a step further, by institutionalizing social noncommittedness. I'm not even sure that's even a word for this. But the result is clear: By moving these things online, we've blurred the boundaries further, not only between what constitutes a friend, but what also constitutes social engagement.

Luckily for me, the non-Facebookers turned out to be a more reliable lot than the Facebookers. So the party wasn't a washout, despite a power failure.

That meant we had to repair to a Thank God It's Friday bar, which is never a good sign on a Friday. But someone brought a camera and we adopted the poses of drunken wildness. The photos were posted on Facebook, so now everyone wishes they'd come.

That's another good thing about Facebook. By moving things online we may now have friends we've never met, and real world friends who promise to attend parties they have no attention of going to. But at least we can now digitally enhance the event so that it looks like something they wished they had gone to.

c2008 Loose Wire

Jeremy Wagstaff is a commentator on technology and appears regularly on the BBC World Service. He can be found online at jeremywagstaff.com or via email at jeremy@loose-wire.com.

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