Another reason to be on facebook?

First, there was the very addictive (fluff) Friends, which I had to give up when work became too hectic. In (fluff) Friends, you maintain a pet, have it run races, win some prizes, and interact with other (fluff)Pets to find some nice little prizes. You can invest time or real money to get neat stuff for your pet, like food or décor. I haven’t visited my (fluff)Pet Wuv in a while, and I’m sure there have been plenty of changes in the game already. Despite being absent, though, I’m still getting gifts from other (fluff)Friends.

Then there was the equally addictive and even more compelling virtual world of YoVille, which is like Facebook’s free version of Second Life. I tried it maybe for a month, but, sadly, it had to go the way of time-consuming non-priorities when I signed up for an extra job and two hours of extra work. My friend Sherwil, who got me hooked in the first place, now has a fancy house with lots of fancy stuff. She also has her own YoVille community already—meaning, she has a more or less close circle of friends in it.

After that, there was Scrabulous, a Facebook application that mimicked Scrabble. It was a fun way to keep in touch with old school friends I didn’t have anything else in common with. Unfortunately, a lawsuit both from Hasbro in North America and Mattel elsewhere has yanked it from Facebook, leaving millions of players hanging.

Now, I’ve just discovered the perfect application for fun-loving, game-playing busy bees like me: Guess the Sketch! It’s another online multiplayer game that found a home in Facebook. It now has thousands of fans guessing and sketching to win a ten-round game. There’s a time limit all the time (100 seconds per round) and each game only lasts ten rounds. It works like one of my favorite old game shows, Win, Lose or Draw. There’s a maximum of ten players, each taking turn to draw a word the application gives them. It can be words like stump, bleed, and height. Or it can be more challenging words like bottomless pit (I drew that, by the way, and I made a stick figure version of the “This is Sparta!” scene). Everybody who guesses the word correctly gets a point—the earlier into the round, the higher.

I’ve been using it to de-stress at work. During my thirty-minute breaks, I log on to Facebook, click on my Guess the Sketch bookmark, and promise to only play only two rounds. Sometimes I’m successful. If I win on the first round, I immediately log off. If my game is really bad, I play three rounds. But that’s around 400 seconds (six minutes)  of good, clean, intelligent albeit escapist fun with real people. Needless to say, I heart Facebook.

There are, however, some people who strongly feel that “Facebook is evil.” In fact, one of my most popular articles going around declares that “Facebook is the end of humanity.” That’s a direct quote from blogger Tommy v2 at tommyzor.com. He explains how Facebook works: “You sign up for an account. You put in some…quotes and little blurbs about yourself, like you were making a singles ad. You are in a way, because you’re about to whore yourself out to the lowest bidder.” Then, he says, “You begin to electronically stalk your friends and people you hate. You can’t stop checking their profile on a daily basis…You get butterflies when you start to see their innermost personal life displayed for all to see. You don’t notice you’re a victim too, since there’s no way to track who’s looking at yours.”

He continues: “You run into someone you Facebook with in real life. They start to tell you about their life and events, but you already know everything… This person you barely know is now congratulating you on your new job. Seems totally appropriate, seeing as they don’t know what…colour your eyes are, or, you know, anything else.” He goes on, “Your attraction to the opposite sex quadruples. Guys that have no balls or personal skills are now chatting you up on Facebook. They’ve seen you drunk in pictures and now they want to be beside you. You love the attention and check your profile every chance you get. You have just found the ultimate dating service – the kind that violates every privacy act and human rights issue known to man.”

His ending has some humor, but it has a creepy ring of truth in it: You start to believe your own Facebook profile. You become more fake and more ‘fake outgoing.’ You change your little status message to alert everyone about your Cuba vacation and any every minutia imaginable. The best part is that since anyone can read this, thieves know what you’re up to and break into your house without incident.” and “You die, finally. No one notices because you weren’t there to post that as your status message. The end.”

I still think it’s not that bad—if you remember two things: 1. Everybody in the world—good and evil—can find a way to read what you post online; and 2. Don’t take it too seriously. It’s not real life.