April 19 was as regular a Tuesday as could be expected. Finals week was approaching, and no one had slept in 24 hours. Yet shortly after lunch, you could walk anywhere, and hear people saying “Facebook.” Within a day, there were over 100 students registered on www.thefacebook.com, and small congregations of anti-Facebookers were forming. I’ve since overheard plenty of conversations about how immature, lame, and childish Facebook is.

Yet Facebook is only a registry of college students across American (and some Canadian) schools and universities. Each student has their own web page, telling the world who they are, how to contact them, and what they like, their listed friends, and an inter-message system.

Yet plenty of people see this simple idea as a vehicle for a popularity contest. They claim it’s just a waste of time, and that the only people that use it are vain creatures, striving for attention.

Vain creatures? While there may be some of these “creatures” on Facebook, I’d say most of them don’t care about how many friends they have on Facebook.

Facebook really is useful, in that I can keep in touch with friends from high school, friends from my AFS experience, and even people I went to school with but didn’t really know. I don’t care how many friends I have listed, but the more there are, the more I can keep in touch with, especially over the summer.

I work all summer long, and working all the time leaves me very little time to get online and chat with my friends. Instead, I can just get on Facebook and message them. It takes all of five minutes (it would take less, but I’ve still got dial-up at home).

Another useful feature is the party function. It’s like the Buzz, in that you can see what’s going on around campus, but it’s not in your email. It also isn’t limited to simply parties, but really anything that involves a group of people doing something. And, you have a better way of talking to the person that is hosting it, since you can just message them. Yeah, the extra minute it takes to email them from the Buzz might not be that long, but why even have to do it?

There’s a long list of other good things about Facebook like the birthday reminders, groups you can create and join, and the ability to visualize your network of friends, which is really pretty interesting. While it doesn’t work on my Mac, you can see a map of your friends network, seeing who you’re connected to through who you know.

Facebook is just a web site. A popular, well-designed, well-managed, interesting web site.

Through it, you can keep in contact with people you grew up with, whether that’s something you enjoy is up to you.

Yeah, it can suck the life out of you ever so slowly, but it’s just a web site.

It’s not going to ruin your lungs, give you cancer, or anything like that. It might have sucked some of your time this week away from school work, but it doesn’t exactly take all that much time to set up.

If you spent too much time browsing everyone’s profile, intent on finding all your friends, then it’s your fault you couldn’t stop. Don’t blame a web site.