Facebook is creepy. I forgot how integral to functioning social networking sites are to today’s college student until I returned to school this week – and facebook.com has gone above and beyond healthy and normal. For those of you unfamiliar with Facebook, it’s essentially the same as MySpace.com, but it’s only for college students. I can’t even begin to tell you how much social drama the introduction of this electronic friend-counting machine has caused.

Now, not only can people look you up and evaluate you by the few blurbs you put next to your name, they have introduced an rss-based news feed that informs you of every action your friends have made in the past, well, forever. So, if someone made a new friend, joined a new group, got married, went to the bathroom… ok, just kidding on that last one… but I wouldn’t be shocked if they introduced a bathroom ticker at some point in the future.

Social networking is great on a lot of levels – it lets you look up that smelly girl from grade school and see if she made it to college. Or it lets you search for that cute guy or gal you met at a party last week and ask to be their friend. It helps student groups keep in touch and even gives professors a chance to look up all your personal information even before they meet you. Oh, and don’t forget the beauty of potential employers checking out your wasted weekend photos – which is always great fodder for when you finally score that interview.

The part that freaks me out the most is how few of my “friends” on Facebook are actually people who I’m friends with. Heck, I would say most of them are people I wouldn’t even recognize on the street. That aside, were I to recognize them, I would probably know their relationship status and political persuasion – not to mention the timeline of our friendship that details exactly how and why we know each other.

*shudders.*

Last year, the guy I lived with used Facebook as a dating service. Apparently, if you are a male and list your sexual preference as interested in “men,” you get some interesting solicitations. In any case, he did meet a guy he really liked via Facebook and they dated for several months. Personally, I would think that the whole “getting to know you” phase would be pointless, considering you would already know pretty much everything there is to know about the person from your Facebook-to-Facebook meeting before you agreed to meet them… well, face-to-face. Anyway, so they dated for awhile and then my roommate decided to call it off. “Too clingy,” he said.

Shaking him in person wasn’t too difficult, but getting him to change his relationship status on Facebook was a whole other ballgame.

I’ve had other friends use Facebook as a source for fake i.d.’s. They would look up girls (usually sorority girls who have a particular penchant for drinking and easy money) who were already 21 and looked sort of like them, message them, and offer them some serious cash to get them to “lose” their license and get it replaced. Pretty witty idea if you ask me, yet most definitely not legal.

Considering those anecdotes are two of many stories of Facebook drama before the current creepy add-ons, I can only imagine how ridiculous this is going to get.

My favorite part of the rebellion against this? The number of Facebook groups that have formed in opposition. Oh, the irony. Here’s my favorite: "Facebook has crossed the line". Here’s my favorite quote from the ensuing group discussion:
“I also heard that facebook is starting a new thing where it keeps track of your masturbation schedule too.”

I’m thinking kerowhack is going to quit Facebook and migrate over to MySpace. Although, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before MySpace crosses the line and puts a link to “view the Web cam in my bathroom.” Remember only to click on mine if you want to see barf in the bathtub.