"Can I say you're my girlfriend on Facebook?"

There's an annoying girl at my job who has some serious growing up to do. One of her many horrifying common behaviors is playing "house" at the job and designating different coworkers as different members of her family. For a while she had a huge crush on me, and thus I became the husband. Whenever new people were hired, she'd excitedly hug me and exclaim in her nasal voice, "This is Derek, he's my husband! He's the best husband in the world!" Then she'd switch to a more serious tone to warn the girls that they'd better not flirt with me. Terrifying. Of course, she wanted to marry me on Facebook. After weeks of continually reminding me that I have yet to click "yes" that we are indeed married, I finally gave in and did it. After a while, trying to finally give her the message that I'm not interested, I switched to being married with another one of our coworkers, a girl I'm good friends with but my "wife" hated. When she saw that I'd switched the status, she had a real break down. Female co-workers told me about her heart break over the incident.

In conclusion, jesus christ, be glad you're not on Facebook.

Certain features that make it really useful for college students. You can list your classes in your profile and the page can create a list for you of people in your classes. You can easily find people in your class to ask them questions about upcoming tests, what the homework was, etc. Also, unlike MySpace, there's more local community centered stuff since the only people on Facebook I interact with are fellow UNCC students and I don't see anyone from Harvard. For example there's groups with local interest like "I LOVE " rather than just "I LOVE LIMP BIZKIT." Like other people mentioned, there's the announcing/organizing events too.

MORE IMPORTANT THAN TEXTING?!?!?!?!??!

That is pretty harsh.

Au contraire. I think a lot of people use it for exactly that reason. That's the impression I've gotten, anyway.

hi, do you know the internet?

It's not that social networking replaces your social life, it just... mediates it. Instead of personally inviting people to parties via word of mouth/telephone/email or just throwing it up on a flyer, you're sending it to a reasonably targeted, much larger group than you'd be comfortable calling. The downside is that pretty soon you're doing the majority of communication through there, any "event" that can vary from a party or concert to two people sitting around drunk turns into some "scandalous" photo diary, and there's the online backchannel that sucks everyone in.

I've been around people where there's this obnoxious feedback loop where they're pretty much trying to come up with new people to befriend and more pictures/content to put up on things like myspace, and half of what they talk about is myspace. Urgh.

Still, why is word of mouth/telephone/email an inherently better form of communication? I agree that it's a "larger group than you'd be comfortable calling" but I think that's very likely a good thing. For example, tonight I'm going to play soccer with a casual friend from a class. He invited me and the rest of the group with a facebook message. It would have been awkward for an acquaintance to call/email, and probably would have never happened.

I had a friend whose girlfriend changed her facebook relationship status to "single" in order to make him jealous, or something.

putting yr actual girlfriend/boyfriend as 'wife' or 'husband' on facebook is kind of crepey though, surely it should refer only to actual married spouses or to best friends.

which reminds me ... enrique, are you still gonna be in glasgow this weekend?

haha this is true.

I know a fair amount of Johnston & Wales -- a local culinary school -- on there.

i don't know anyone obsessed with it, though. thank heavens.

http://badge.facebook.com/badge/36910239.80.948704031.png

...

Yesterday
Brian is single. 12:19pm

Molly Daniel is hating facebook right about now. 9:59am

Molly Daniel joined the group I hate the new facebook. 9:39am

Molly Daniel joined the group Students against Facebook's "Mini-Feed". 4:52am

Danielle Cohen joined the group WE HATE THE NEW FACEBOOK FACELIFT. 3:39am

Ann Marie Coddington added new photos. 3:19am

Lauren "Philly" Grimsley wrote a new note. 2:59am
THIS IS WACK!!!
THIS FACEBOOK SHIT IS WACK...CUZ ACCORDING TO FACEBOOK I KNOW WHAT U DID ONE MINUTE AGO, 3 HOURS AGO ANDDD THIS WEEKEND!!!
Continue reading...

It spread this summer beyond Trinity in Ireland. And resulted in much "Oh no! PLebs!" type comments.
Bebo is more popular here for the reason that you can find your old school friends and facebook wasn't available to anyone with anything less than an (a)tcd.ie address. Radio stations, music things etc have bebo pages rather than MySpace, which seemed a bit odd to me. I committed beboicide a while back. Considering commiting Facebookicide.

That said it's been handy for me, esp now that people I know are scattered to the winds, to toronto and cambridge and london and shit. There's no option for saying you're a drop out though..

The new changes are horrible. I mean it was a bit weird before that you could check who's profile had changed, go see and not notice or realise what had changed. But this is odd. It should be possible to disable it.