Facebook leads to many late nights.

Facebook offers endless entertainment and information for one rising college freshman.

Date published: 5/13/2008

FOR SOME, it is their demise, as they spend hours perusing it. For others, it is a place where "stalking" is legal. And yet, for others, it is a valuable resource for, among other things, meeting people.

If you gave this description to any teenager--or person under the age of 25--he could almost immediately tell you the object I am talking about is the oh-so-wonderful Web site, Facebook. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, a then-student at Harvard University, the "social utility that connects you with the people around you" became a wild craze.

I remember back in 10th grade when some of my friends talked about the site, telling me it was so "in" to have a page and soon would be all the rage. Back in my "naive" state, I wondered why I would ever want one, comparing it to MySpace and realizing that there was no point to having a Facebook page unless I was going to college and trying to meet new people.

Well, I soon succumbed to peer pressure and a personal yearning. I allowed some friends to help me create a personal page, much to the opposition of my (gasp!) unknowing mother. For the first couple of months, I was married to Facebook--I was on the site night and day. However, since I was thinking I was hiding it from my mom, I had to do my site-searching in private (or so I thought). It turns out, my mom knew all along, even though I would close my laptop screen when she came by, in hopes of hiding the site. She even went so far as to go on Facebook herself and search my name.

Well, my obsession, much like that of getting a new puppy, soon died down. My compulsion to look at my friends' pages and see their pictures became tame, and I was able to continue on with life as usual.

Enter senior year. Things have gone back to the way they were when I first became attached to the oh-so-enthralling site. It doesn't help that senior-itis causes me to have severe bouts of procrastination. There are times when I will seriously search about 20 different pages of my friends or look at countless photo albums; it becomes an addiction faster than you can say the word.

I'm not honestly sure what is so captivating about the Web site, other than that you can see every aspect of people's lives (even people whom you have met only once or twice). In a way, my privacy and the privacy of others has been invaded.

Date published: 5/13/2008

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