Valuable social utility or collossal waste of time?

[Bald is beautiful]

What are your thoughts on the whole Facebook phenomenon?

[rjpetty04]

I think it is ok.

Some people are just idiots.

I only use it to talk to friends and send funny things to them. Especially the friends I have from my home state because we dont get to see eachother often.

[Sarah B]

Considering my own experience with Facebook, it can be both.

On one hand, it's helped me stay in contact with old friends, made it easier to make new ones, and helped me get in touch with specific people who I wouldn't have been able to find otherwise.

I'm entering my sophomore year in college, and Facebook has been a huge aid to my keeping up with highschool friends; it's easier to coordinate getting together with them on facebook, it lets me know what they're up to and when they'll be in town, and reminds me about birthdays/special events for them.

It also helps me make new friends; sometimes I'll sit next to someone in class who I've never met before and end up having a great conversation, then never see them again because it's a several hundred person lecture hall. Facebook makes it easy for me to look them up and get in contact, and arrange meeting up or hanging out in a way that doesn't impinge on either person's privacy.

A specific example where Facebook really helped out was when I found somebody's wallet; they'd dropped it in the dining commons of my college and left. I logged in to the network for my UC, did a search, found her within five minutes, and messaged her to let her know where to get her wallet back.

On the other hand, though, all of the applications, surveys, games, and so on can lead to hours wasted. They also don't always tell you what you're signing up for, and if you're not careful you can end up bombarded by advertisements and forced to send the application to a ton of other friends to "get your results". (This is really annoying.)

Overall, I'd say it's an extremely valuable social utility that has the possibility to be a gargantuan waste of time. As long as you use it intelligently and don't get sucked into all the surveys and applications that people send you, it's great.