Signs of a Facebook Addict

I joined facebook very reluctantly. First it was for the sake of the many games like jumble or pathwords. I would open facebook just for playing the games. My friend list was very limited. And very restricted and private as I was not sure I could carry on so why add friends just for the sake of it. Second reason was to look at all the photos the family was posting which I was unable to view.

When I started realising the fun people were having interacting on this site and I started getting hooked on to it. Slowly the friend list went on an inclusive growth stage- so I added relatives, blog friends, school friends, college friends.... and so on until now I have a good number of friends though not really impressive.

Until sometime ago I thought facebook was for social networking. But now I observe it serves many a larger purpose.

So after a long hiatus- here is my notorious "list post" coming up.

1. Trumpet Blowing- happy about something? want to tell the world in general what you have achieved? Just post it on Fb and you will have a number of "likes" and "great work" and all raising your general happiness levels

2. Feel Good Factor Enhancer- Is it your birthday or any other special day- the automatic birthday indicator to your friends serve a great purpose- they will have friends rushing to wish you in advance so that they do not forget on the d day. So if people live on different time zones, in effect you celebrate your birthday from day -1 to day 0 to day +1.

and even if you suspect that people may miss wishing you- just start posting leading status messages- like, the hubby has already bought my gift or like the children made me a birthday card .... so on and so forth and people will be prompted to wish you

3. Support System- are you pissed off with something or someone? Are you going through a bad phase? Just post on fb and people will come in hordes to offer their sympathies or even bad mouth the objective of your anger with equal or more intensity

4. Annoyed? Do you want to indicate your annoyance? You could post something scathing and hope the person intended for reads it or you could subtly delete the person from your friend list. It is the ultimate insult to be deleted from the friend list and it is a parampara jo orkut ke zamane se chali aa rahi hai!

4. Paranoid?- suddenly you think that some of your friends might post something bad on your wall. Spill your dirty secrets while you are asleep (which means not online)? Give gaalis? Or take your pictures and morph them into something ugly and post it all over the net? But you are scared to "unfriend" them? Or worse, you want to secretly keep tabs on the going ons in their life but do not want to allow them to post anything on your wall?

Simple. Just restrict access to your wall, photos and all but cunningly keep them on your friend list thereby maintaining a one way communication controlled by you. And if the "almost unfriended friend" is just an idle gazer on fb and is not really comunicating with you, then even better- they needn't even know about your restrictions.

So what are your FB lessons? Let's expand the list.