Irony Can Be Pretty Ironic Sometimes

On Monday I promised a post the next day about Facebook.com. Well, part of the reason that I didn't get anything posted on Tuesday about Facebook was because I spend way too much time ON Facebook. It's pretty addictive.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Facebook, and I'm assuming that's almost all of you because most of the readers of this blog are older than 22, it's kind of like Friendster but set up with college networks. Every single person at Vanderbilt who came here straight out of college has been on Facebook since undergrad, and almost everyone who didn't come here straight out of college has never been on Facebook. It's the great divide.

At first I resisted joining, because I never really got anything out of Friendster, and I never joined MySpace either. BUT, after seeing it in action with my roommate and a bunch of my friends, I decided that for my social life it was a necessary evil. And evil it is, at least in terms of sucking my time away from reading and sleep.

It's awesome. It's got great potential for digital flirting, along with helping me get to know people that I've met over the last few weeks. What's basically happened so far is that when I meet someone and have more than a 2-minute conversation with them, either I "facebook" them or they "facebook" me, meaning one of us requests that the other become our "facebook friends." As of 9:00 PM on Wednesday, September 27th, I have 57 friends, 52 of which are in the Vanderbilt network.

I think the two most fun aspects of Facebook are the photosharing and writing on people's "walls." With the photos, if you upload an album, say, for example, all the photos that you took at the tailgate for Vandy's first home football game, you can "tag" the people in each photo and tell Facebook who they are. I was tagged in five or six different photos people took that day and posted to Facebook, and because I was tagged you can see those photos when you look at my profile. Of course people can also comment on photos. As for the "wall," it's really just a messageboard on each person's profile where you can post comments to or about that person. And when you're looking at someone's profile and see a wall post that doesn't seem to make any sense, you can click on the "wall-to-wall" and see the two people's back-and-forth wall convo.

There are also groups set up, mostly for comedic value, although some are issue-oriented, but I'm not too into them. One of the few that I am in is called "Fantasy Gunner." The basic premise is that before each class you pick a "gunner," i.e. someone who's always raising their hand, and you get points for every time they raise their hand and get called on. You get bonus points for all kinds of different things: if they reference a case we haven't read yet to slyly demonstrate that they've read ahead, if they pose a "hypothetical," if they go talk to the professor at the front of the room after class ends...

A couple weeks ago Facebook introduced a new feature called the "newsfeed." There was actually a bit of an uproar about it and it was in the news. Now when you log on to the site, the home page you see has a list of what all of your friends have been doing on facebook over the last couple days: who's written on who's wall, who's added whom as a friend, how many of your friends are now officially attending that party on Saturday, who's posted photos from the weekend. I think even the people who were up in arms about it at first have got to admit that it's pretty convenient.

Anyway, if you're interested in Facebook, I recommend checking it out. You used to have to have a college e-mail address in order to sign up, but they just (as in yesterday) rolled out a new system where people in the real world can sign up. Then you can search for me and we can become Facebook friends. Yay.

When I first signed up I was at such a disadvantage compared to the younger people who had been on forever, because none of my friends were on, so none of them had posted photos with me in them and tagged me, so for the longest time the only photos I had on my profile were ones that I had uploaded and tagged myself in (which is, like, a total faux pas and totally lame).