The pleasure that is “catching up with old friends” has been all but ruined. The second you open your mouth to regale your pal with the latest juicy gossip, the anecdote to end them all or the story of debauched evenings without them, they instincively know what you’re going to say. They know where you’ve been, what you’ve done, who your new friends are, what photos you’ve taken, when you last ate out and what you ate, the movies you’ve seen, the music you’ve listened to. They might even know how active you were between the sheets last night, if you’re using that heart-rate and health monitoring gizmo.

What is it that has endowed long-list friends with such prescient mental abilities? The Facebook Timeline, of course.

The only thing that doesn’t seem to feature on your Facebook Timeline right now is an ongoing record of the looseness or otherwise of one’s stools…but I am sure someone will be working on an app to connect with FourSquare to make sure nobody missed out on that juicy bit of gossip as well. Ewww.