The Stalker's Guide to the new Facebook

As many of you young, hip, up-to-date Internet users have no doubt noticed, Facebook has this mildly irritating tendency to change its layout at excessive speeds. If I didn't remind myself regularly that Mark Zuckerberg does want to make money, I would start thinking that he's intentionally trying to confuse us all.

Being one of those young, quirky, up-to-date Internet users myself, there's no way I couldn't have seen the changes. What I didn't anticipate was my overwhelming hatred for the latest version of Mr. Zuckerberg's capitalist, money-driven insanity. It was like love at first sight, except I wanted to kill something.  (I didn't, though. Instead I went out and considered buying a bloody and violent video game like Metro 2033, but then decided against it since I have the bank account of a college student (it's a joke, get it?) and went home to study for finals.)

It all started when I read this article about how our young brown-jacket-wearing friend was bitching at college students to stop complaining about finals. Apparently the word hit for 'finals' and 'stress' was enormous around mid-December, and the flood of people getting on to vent almost brought the site down. Then, with typical broomstick-up-the-arse arrogance, he said something along the lines of "Maybe you should stop whining and actually study for your exams. Otherwise drop out and be a multi-billionaire like me, the greatest thing since sliced bread."


After posting a scathing retort as my status (involving Mr. Genius Dropout's favorite word, of course), I went to post on my friend's wall. Except her wall wasn't just a wall anymore, but a collection of status updates, posts, and photos splattered on the page in no particular order. Okay, I thought, ignoring the vertical line going straight down the middle. Confusing, but I can still find the text field...wait, what's that?

It was a timeline. And I mean, a timeline. And not just any old timeline, but when combined with all the other creepy elements that have been incorporated into the social networking site, it becomes one that has turned Facebook into the most effective stalking machine since the invention of the yellow pages. Oh, wait. Most of you probably don't remember what that is. It's ok. If you Google it, it'll tell you. Google tells you everything, which means it comes in at a close second in the Stalkeronicsathon.


So to honor this new invasion into our privacy (or at least the illusion of privacy, since the concept itself actually ceased to exist quite a while ago), I have put together the following tutorial for all of you who have yet to grasp the ropes of the new stalking-m -- I mean, Facebook.

1. Facebook is the new Google Earth

This new level of stalkerdom is pretty self-explanatory. Simply put, you can now add locations to your photos, which then nicely summarizes all the places you've been to and what happened there for every creeper who wants to know.

2. The Timeline


I'm not talking about the actual content of the timeline, where all the posts and updates and stuff goes. No. I'm talking about this, on the upper right-hand corner.

 

 Now, if I wanted to get really creepy, I can zoom in, like so:

So if you are a socially awkward and possibly pathological person who wants to stalk your object of affection/demise, this is for you! You can zone in on a specific decade, pick a certain year, zoom in on a particular month, find one day, and then discover who your victim met with, what they ate for dinner, where they slept, what happened at school that day, who/what they were angry at, why they punched their boss, and any other tidbits of interest. 

Then, of course, you scurry home and add all that to your ever-growing file that could rival the CIA's on Al Qaeda, except unlike them, you are forced to keep it in an old-school filing cabinet because either a.) You can't afford a laptop or b.) You're completely paranoid and convinced that your next-door neighbor, an old cat lady who only leaves her home to buy groceries or hobbles out onto the porch to yell at partying teenagers, is going to infiltrate your home with a SWAT team and hack into your computer while the Navy S.E.A.L.s stand guard.

But wait! It gets better! Take a closer look at the bottom of this timeline:

And look again:

Because you see, there are no planet or lightning bolt symbols that I know of on a computer.

 Which segues perfectly into the last step of this tutorial...

3. You can now Like every aspect of my life, including my birth

You can stop laughing now.

Alright guys, buckle up. This is the best part.

There are some things you can take off of Facebook, like certain embarrassing photos or wall posts that could potentially get you blacklisted in the job market. You can prevent people from commenting and liking said embarrassing things just by deleting it, period. Unfortunately, my birth seems to be pretty permanent.