Ms/Mr Trashy-Shots-Now-Define-My-Life
You are the reason so many of us joined Facebook in the first place, and for this we thank you. Once upon a time you were believed to be lovely and sweet. However after a series of photographs emerging of you in darkened places, with random hook-ups and bloodshot eyes, it’s a different story. Your secret is out. You are like a celebrity, and your drunken escapades add excitement to our news feeds like Lindsay and Britney brighten up Who and People magazines.
Your albums epitomise the six stages of the Facebook photo (the perfect smile, the intentionally silly face, the peace-fingers/head tilt, the above boobs pic, the laid back on a chair with a beer shot and a look which says ‘I wonder how many friends I can tag and embarrass with this photo’). I always thought you were a closet drama queen. All the better to you for finally embracing it.

Little Miss Popular
There would have been a time when more than 100 Facebook friends would have made you cool in Australia. Now every man and his dog have scavenged their high schools, workplaces and college residences for every person that ever smiled at them in the hallway. This means that now to count as a true popularity queen, a minimum of 300 friends are needed. You have over a thousand wall posts, and it’s not just because you joined Facebook long before most of us even knew it existed. Facebook equals true social networking to you. All the best with it. I hope you can channel Corey and put those contacts to good use. Unfortunately you may have to lose the yellow sunnies.

SuperWall Slut
Before you read this, you should be aware of my contempt for you. I was forced to turn off SuperWall notifications because you and your friends were filling my wall space with crap about angels and true friendship and not-so-funny pictures that wasted my time because they took so long to download. It is time you realised no-one wants the equivalent of Facebook spam, so for gods sake stop forwarding everyone the same trashy messages. (Only for them to be re-surfaced and re-gurgitated by another SuperWall Slut a few weeks later.) I bet that you were one of these people who claimed you’d never join the dirty deeps of Facebook. You’re too long gone to remember such days now.

Poker Poker Pick Me Pick Me!
Damn it, one of these days I’ll beat you at your own Poke War so I can once again check my emails and Facebook in peace. Do you realise that every time you poke someone like moi you are FORCING me to respond by poking you back? As this is the only way I know how. I know technology is improving these days with countless applications like SuperPoke, but it is just my natural instinct, as a human raised on Facebook, that I will poke you back. So stop poking me and I’ll stop poking you! As Anna Coren asked the Chaser boys just recently: Let’s just call it a truce for the New Year? Please?

Ms/Mr Diplomatic
You know who you are. Even though you’ll spend the next ten minutes after reading this thinking up ways to peacefully restore your credibility. You’re the person who clicks ‘Maybe Attending’ when invited to events, knowing that you’d never show up but can’t bring yourself to say so openly. You’re the person who has no details on how you know your friends becasue they added you, and you couldn’t say no, right? Never mind that you don’t even recognise their profile pic.

Application Addict
You’re probably sleeping with Ms/Mr Diplomatic, so similar are your sharing, unquestioning values. Except that you may be a little technological inept as well. You add every single application that was ever made to litter the beloved, sterile Facebook interface either because you think it’ll offend your friends if you don’t add it or because you don’t know what you’re doing and by the time you follow the prompts you’ve already added it and you don’t know how to get rid of it. Some advice: just click ignore. No one will know the difference and your computer will be all the faster for it.

The Mouse
You carefully set your profile to private and proactively block people who annoy you. What they don’t know can’t hurt them right? You laboriously de-tag any photo’s of you so that you don’t appear in images on Facebook and only your closest friends get to see your real profile - your other friends only have access to a limited profile. You signed up with a fake birthday and hometown after Today Tonight told you how dangerous Facebook stalkers could be. I bet you’d even sign up with a fake name if it weren’t going to be completely detrimental to the select few who know you even exist on cyberspace. Sorry sweetie, but you’re wasting your time. Facebook is only fun when you can be a fully-fledged exhibitionist.

Mr/Mrs Jetsetter
Yep, I’m jealous. So I’m going to write about you. You post photos of your worldly travels on Facebook for the rest of us to sigh at. And your status is updated with fancy cities from your latest trip. You thrive on applications like My Trips and Cities I’ve Been To, just so the rest of us poor students can squirm in our squalor. Facebook is the ideal way for you to stay in touch with everyone while gloating publicly upon your latest adventure. Meh. As long as you’re not a Mr/Ms Trashy-Shots-Now-Define-My-Life come Mr/Ms Jetsetter, you’re not so bad. No one cares about photo’s of you getting drunk in Thailand except for the people who were actually there. Sorry.

The MySpace Convert
You and Facebook have a complex love-hate relationship. You only joined because all your friends pointed out how uncool having MySpace makes you now. But oh how you miss all those customisable, colour-choosing, complicated MySpace page functions. Don’t worry buddy. The times they are a-changing. Soon someone will come up with an application or a special profile type so that you can add bands and completely random randoms to your friend list. Then at least it’ll look like you’re semi-cool.

The Procrastinator
I feel your pain. When you are with your friends Facebook is The Devil. You talk in brash, bold terms about how all this dastardly internet communication means the downfall of good, old-fashioned conversations. True, Facebook reminds you about whose party is next but all these friends of yours who use it all the time should be taught a lesson, tsk, tsk. You have self control, thus you hold the moral high ground when Facebook inevitably becomes the topic of conversation. But come exam time, Facebook takes on amazingly interesting qualities. Your online status is, well, perpetual. Though you’d never admit it, you need Facebook like a junkie needs that next hit. If only for it’s procrastination potential, kudos to Mark Zuckerberg for prolonging lives and enhancing conversations that would otherwise not be possible without the visual and literary procrastination aids that abound on Facebook.

The Real Addict
If you go for more than ten minutes without it, you start to feel lost. Where has your list of friends gone? What events are you attending again? God, you’re losing your identity! It’s going to be okay. Take a deep breath and admit to yourself: you-are-a-facebook-addict. Hey, it’s okay. This makes you, like, totally cool right now. You are quite the lady of the moment. It is you that A Current Affair and Today Tonight talk about endlessly and hunt down for interviews. Never mind that you are the centre of a spiraling moral media panic, you are what keeps Facebook going when the rest of us have other stuff to do. Like have a life. You update your status as often as you change your mind and you take photos at parties with the sole purpose of uploading them to Facebook. You post wall posts more often than you text and you are grateful to Facebook for improving your typing skills to no end. Don’t worry, it’ll pass. At least you don’t use MySpace anymore *fingers crossed*.

Photo Courtesy of Euphoria, Creative Commons


NB. The author considers herself a self-diagnosed schizophrenic and knows only too well that there is a little of each of these facebook personalities lurking inside her. How else could she know each of them so well?