Facebook folly

When I finally joined Facebook, I got all LinkedIn and Twittery about it. Although I never feel like visiting my own pages on either LinkedIn or Twitter.

These days I resist embracing new ways to electronically communicate. I'm just waiting for some pint-sized hologram to pop out of my toilet tank and chirp Hi! Would you like to join Biffybook? You can dish with friends while exfoliating or Q-Tipping your ears or, you know, whatever you do in here!

But Facebook sucked me in, with all of its inviting little features and crack-like word games. Facebook gilds procrastination with a sense of being purposefully social. It's great for birthday reminders, photo and video sharing, and reconnecting with or staying updated on far-flung pals. Then you start checking it every hour -- scanning the home page, tweaking your profile, checking your inbox -- then every half-hour, then every minute you'd rather not be doing something that needs to be done. It's like moving into a huge shiny new house, then looking around a month later and realizing that you're spending all your free time cleaning it.

With 140 million active users, Facebook sure could use a phalanx of strict editors. But seeing as it's a democracy, it has all types of abusers. Here are a few of the most common:

The Oversharers : The question that tops everybody's home page -- What are you doing right now? -- should have a content filter that blocks tedium. All too many messages remind me of my sixth-grade diary: No boys called me. Washed hair. One side didn't turn out very good though and Sat in the beanbag and painted toenails while watching 'Orca the Killer Whale' on TV. This doesn't mean you shouldn't post on Facebook unless you just scaled Kilimanjaro, discovered a new chemical element or had a Daniel Craig sighting. Just resist the urge to purge every ... inconsequential ... detail that crosses your mind.

The Exhibitionists : More titillating, but not by much. Hey, you two, you do know that every installment of your bodice-ripping wall-to-wall flirtation is splattered across both of your Friend-iverses. Right?

The Photo Frenemies : Yeah, YOU look really cute in that picture. And I'm channeling W.C. Fields in a parka. So don't go blithely posting it all over the place, or I'll really give you something to tag.

The Plunderers : As of this writing, I have 145 Friends. In keeping with Facebook culture, I barely know many of them, and others I've never met. Do I really want 200 Friends? Oh, probably. That seems about the minimum required to feel socially well-traveled. But 400? 800? The limit is 5,000. No one-headed human can keep up with even one-tenth that many people, yet Facebook is rife with mad mug-shot amassers who won't stop until they've topped the four-digit Friend level. They're the Web equivalent of Old West hunters standing proudly over piles of overkill buffalo, which they then promptly leave to rot on the prairie.

The Climbers : Everybody has at least one of these -- the guy you barely know who asks to be your Friend, then trolls the rest of your stash for phrases like bestselling author or President-elect of the United States and pounces. I would like to ask Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak -- who pops up in my People You May Know box almost as often as Botox ads -- to be my social-website pal, but I don't really want to bother him. He has stuff to do. I might tempt Hizzoner into a game of Word Twist when he could be increasing arts funding or the snowplow budget. But if clawing your way to fame on the mug shots of others is your M.O., here's a tip: You'll have better luck if you post a profile shot of your svelte self in a bikini (or just go ahead and photoshop your head onto Heidi Klum's body). You just might suddenly become Friends with several bold-face names who happen to be straight males, as one local woman did.

Some smart people I know who have thus far resisted the magnetic death eddy of Facebook have it right. It is a lot like high school for grownups, with all the cliquing and time-frittering.

I can only hope Facebook's hold on me will one day be eroded into oblivion by my own strip-mining. In the meantime, I have to go change my profile pic.