Don’t we all love Facebook? You can keep up with the lives of people you would otherwise never see or hear from, connect with long-lost relatives, see pictures of your high school friends’s babies. Where would any of us be today without social media? How did we ever waste time before Facebook? I wish I had a log of the hours that go by sometimes when I think I’ll check in for just a few minutes to see what everyone’s up to. Know what I mean? Which brings me to a philosophical dilemma I’d like to share with all of you: what is the proper Facebook birthday etiquette? The real question is probably something more like: does anyone really know the true answer?

Since thanks to Facebook, we all now know all our “friends’s” birthdays, not knowing or forgetting to wish someone “Happy Birthday!” is no longer an acceptable excuse. So what do you do? Do you call? Do you send a card? An email? Or is simply writing “Happy Birthday!” on their wall enough? Or is that too impersonal? How about liking someone else’s “Happy Birthday!” post? Will that hold water, or is it essential that you post your own?

These are the questions that occupy my mind as I see my friends’s birthdays come up on my news feeds. It seems like it’s always someone’s birthday, and I’m never quite sure if the Facebook “Happy Birthday!” is sincere enough or if people expect more. When it’s my birthday, I wrestle with a whole different set of etiquette dilemmas. How do you respond to someone’s Facebook “Happy Birthday!” greeting to you? Say you get a whole bunch of them- do you respond to each one individually as they are posted? Can you just say “thank you!,” or is that too cold? Is it better to say “Thank you…(person’s name)! So nice of you to remember!” Or does that start to sound pat and formulaic after the first two or three? Do you seem appreciative enough if you wait until the next day and then just update your status with a collective thank you to all those who posted “Happy Birthday!” wishes on your wall the day before? So many things to worry about and it’s your birthday! I suppose that if I looked hard enough, or maybe not even hard at all, I could find a blog or an article somewhere that brings up these questions and gives the most socially acceptable solutions, but sometimes it’s fun to speculate, and even worry a little, over minor issues that have no concrete answers. If anyone is interested in my advice, I think you should just do what feels right to you and your friends. If they don’t like it, maybe they aren’t really friends, after all.