Facebookaholic

Me: Hello my name is __________<—insert my government name here. And I am a facebookaholic.

ALL: Hello _______ !<—insert my government name here, also. Welcome!

I remember the day like it was yesterday. Ha! And it was only a few years ago! How technology makes the time fly!…Anyway, I was illegally sitting in an all male dorm room watching a movie that, at the time, was my secret indulgence- Lord of the Rings. Please don’t tell anyone. My friend, who was so adamantly attempting to distract me from the magic that was taking place on a less-than-quality LCD television, asked me if I heard of a new online site called…Dun.Dun.Duuun!…”The Facebook.” Upon briefly perusing the rather simple looking site, I became hooked. I fell in love with the blue and white. I was intoxicated by the idea of the “profile creation” that included uploading a candid photo instead a of a text resume. In my collegiate consortium, the word on the street was “Facebook” and it spread like fire. I remember organizing my friends to send emails to the brilliant creators of the site, demanding that they “Add our school!” And, when the faces behind Facebook added our school, we simply forgot that blackplanet.com ever existed before it, or that myspace.com could have been just as cool. We forgot that we ever had an addiction to the site that was created about 5 years before and the site that drove our musical passions online. And why did my friends, classmates, and I forget?

Did we somehow say, “Hey Mark did it better than Tom and Omar?” Did we somehow find comfort in the simplicity of the symmetrical arrangement of blues and whites that ever so made us cling to the site? Wait. Myspace used the blue and white arrangement, as well. A look at Blackplanet today shows that they use the blue and white arrangement, too! Hey! Copycats? No. The psychology of human activity and color schemes? Most likely. Do blue and white look great together and are easy on the eyes? Absolutely.

What really connected us to Facebook was the exclusivity of it all. We got the chance to connect with an exclusive audience largely consisting of our educated peers. What made us leave Facebook? The public minifeed and the jailbate invitation: “Jane Doe from Joe Shmoe High School would like to add you as a friend.” To catch a predator is real and they probably start on Facebook. What brought us back to Facebook? Myspace.com/ A.corny.fitness.personality.with.a.profile., the option to hide the minifeed, and the educated crowd. Damnit, we’re elitists at heart. Sigh.

And where is Facebook going? <–insert Buzz Lightyear quote here. To say the least, we should all buy the stock. Excuse me, while I update my Facebook status. (Government Name) is “wondering how much Facebook’s stock costs?”