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A couple years back I signed up for Facebook so I could make a point with my students about who had access to the reams of information they were volunteering online. Since then, Facebook has radically improved its privacy options. And my ability to make that point had been lost.

However, I now find myself using Facebook almost in exclusion of everything else I used to do online. While thinking about it, I realized that Facebook has become almost (but not quite) what I had tried to cobble together out of a vanity webpage, mailing lists, blog, etc, etc. It's a one stop shop.

Where it lacks is with some minor customization features. I'd like to be able to link to my stories. I'd like to be able to maintain a fan identity on Facebook without needing to maintain separate accounts (which is technically against the TOS, but which doesn't seem to stop anyone). It would be nice if I could connect my Facebook and LiveJournal presences.

In the past couple months, a huge portion of my high school class has come online. I've been receiving friend requests from people I haven't talked to in 16 years, and from people I didn't even talk to then. All of us have been registered with classmates.com for multiple years, but there wasn't any inter-group communication until FB got involved.

But, as with all online developments, FB is a time suck. My Hero (My Heroes Ability app) has crossed level 75, and will hit 76 in the next day or two. My Celebrity (Make Me A Celebrity app) is becoming more famous by the minute. Then I stumbled across a TV trivia game. Unfortunately, the questions for My Secret Identity and Big Wolf On Campus were abysmal, so naturally I had to correct that. And that's after the Scabulous game got shut down.

So much for that moral high ground with my students.