I'm a self-proclaimed yuppie who got dragged kicking and screaming into Facebook by my girlfriend earlier this year, and I have to confess that I love it.

It seems like the entire site is engineered to appeal to yuppies with its slick, intuitive interface populated with lots of empty white space that gives the illusion of reducing clutter.

Another expertly developed aspect of Facebook is its extremely well done integration with the BlackBerry. As faithful corporate drones, almost all of us have them. Facebook for BlackBerry lets us seamlessly make status updates and impulsively upload grainy, candid snapshots at a moment's notice. Is your boss having too much to drink at Happy Hour? Instant blackmail!

As a Facebook devotee I feel so much more hip and urbane than the unwashed masses on mySpace and LiveJournal. And isn't that the whole point?

-KZ

Maybe the success of facebook is due to this stuff. I personally find 'what are you doing now' annoying, bit at least I do it when all else fails. The socalled 'applications' f-king suck. Occasionally I will, in fact, deign to start one but quit quickly, as they are like those 'you have won a computer' popups... and I have no interest in figuring out whether Mike or Sharmine are 'nicer'... they are both c--ts. The picture functionality is fantastic though with the most successful (ealiest?) tagging mechanism.

I know I'm the wrong demographic (40+, married w/ children), but Jesus, don't you young people have anything better to do than set up a virtual circle of friends so you can "poke each other" and post pictures no one cares about?

Facebook: E-crack for yuppies

I'm a self-proclaimed yuppie . . . -- Krasnaya Zvezda

"Self-proclaimed yuppie"? Are you also either living in a time warp and/or have perfected time travel? Yuppie went out of the American lexicon about 20 years ago.

If you're a devotee of facebook, please weigh in. I really don't think anyone other than Mark Zuckerberg has benefited in any tangible way from facebook.

I've watched it consume people's day to day lives under the guise of socializing and strain, damage and ruin romantic relationships. I understand its usefulness in getting back in touch with old friends, and have taken advantage of other social networking sites to run pseudo background checks on candidates for jobs, but on balance, I believe the costs outweigh the benefits.

I remember watching people IM each other from adjacent computers while in college and see facebook as a kind of extension of this in terms of damaging social skills.....

And to the poster who described facebook as yuppie crack, I've been led to believe that crack will at least get you high. What's a facebook high? It isn't just feeling better than the folks of myspace is it?

So, help me understand....but I don't think I'll be joining facebook anytime soon.

"How to Permanently Remove Yourself from Facebook" is the only group I ever joined on Facebook. And getting off of it wasn't easy. This only affirmed my decision to leave. Sure, after I left I missed the few Scrabulous games I'd gotten going with some friends. I really, really missed not being able to see photos that my friends shared with one another. To this day, they'll invite me to view them, but I can't. And I can't be a part of alumni networks from high school, college and graduate school. But you know what? Ten days into my Facebook membership I asked myself what it was I felt every time I logged on. It was kind of a cold feeling, very quiet and subtle. It was loneliness. Odd, that it should be that, since Facebook is supposed to be about connection. No thanks. I am too much of an addict for it. I prefer the occasional pang of being left out to the daily hunger of "not enough, not enough" that I felt every time I signed on.

So my friends dragged my butt into Facebook. It's okay, I liked the text twist then got bored. I tried Scrabulous but they got sued so no more scrabble.

I only go on Facebook when I'm severely bored, like there is nothing left to read on Salon or Slate and I've done all my banking.

I only added pictures so my site didn't look totally barren and I simply don't care that I only have 10 friends.

Instead of "trying to deconstruct precisely how it does its voodoo so well", why doesnt he just ask the Facebook creators?

Wow, most posters so far are "too cool for school" when it comes to Facebook.

Let me guess. You don't watch TV either.

Or is that myspace? All I know is that the young people I know who use these sites seem to be obsessed with how may friends/contacts (not sure what the correct term is) they have, and how they rank against their "real world" friends on the popularity scale. Personally, I was damn glad when high school ended all those years ago, and have no idea why folks have become addicted to a site that keeps such vacuous BS going indefinitely. Over the past few years I've had numerous "old friends" come out of the woodwork to badger me into joining various social networking sites, only to never hear from any of them again. Seems like a fool's game to me.

They don't watch television. Notice that they say "television," not "TV," because TV is a nickname, and nicknames are for friends, and television is no friend of theirs ...

Excellent Mr. Show reference, sir.

I'm on Facebook just for the updates and the news feeds. I've met a lot of really nice and smart people over the past 18-plus years in the technology world, and this keeps us in (very loose) communication. I've rekindled some old friendships and started some new ones with former acquaintances.

As for the apps, I use no applications except the most basic ones provided by Facebook. Despite the well-deserved drubbing that they take for making it hard to expunge your account, if you stay within the parameters of the Facebook world, they do seem to have pretty good privacy controls.

I don't spend a lot of time there. I might check in a couple of times a day and cruise the status reports, just because I have a lot of really smart and funny friends and their updates make me laugh. And they often post links that I wouldn't have seen otherwise.

You can lose yourself in anything, but you can usually find yourself again if you want to.