What is it with facebook that has so many of us so addicted

It is funny how popular facebook has become. I find myself " checking in" or updating my status. And why is it when I find myself deeply bothered by something I find myself updating my status to express my anger or disgust over the issue? The same question applies to when my children say or do something cute..I just have to post it. I mean do others truly care that the checkout clerk gave me the evil eye or that my children say or do something cute.
Remember the days when you wanted to get in touch with a friend you actually called them, and in more recent times emailed, or IM'd them...now I find myself saything things like "facebook ya later, or facebook me and we'll set up a time to do lunch. What would your grandparents, or great grandparents in some cases say about facebook?
I sit and ponder the how language is affected by things like email, IM, fcebook, etc. Imagine you are from the early 1900's and you traveled in a time machine to present day. You would truly think everyone has really lost it. That leads me to think about the Back to the Future movies when by 2010 we would all be driving hover cars, and using hover boards. Who would have thought that instead we would all be sitting in our homes ( even on a nice day) with our butts glued to our chairs, staring deeply into a glowing rectangle communicating with our friends for hours on end?
Speaking of friends do any of us "actually" talk to all 400 people we have as our "facebook friends"? Why do we need to have so many FB friends? Is it all about competition? I think it could be that and also these darn FB games that require us to have X amount of friends playing in order to play the game.
There have been other social networking sites and some are at least as popular but FB has worked its way into my favorite soaps. The writers have cleverly added things to the script like , " I will have to update my FB status".
Bottom line is FB is popular, people either love it or love to hate it. Either way I know that every second there are too many people to count actually logging into there FB to fulfill their addiction of this so clverly designed social networking site called Facebook.