At 14, I decided to make myself a MySpace account because the boy I liked had one; little did I know that it would lead to a very unhealthy obsession with a completely different Web site, Facebook. Facebook was created in 2004 in a Harvard dorm room and has grown into the largest social networking site on the Internet. Every day, 150 million users update their friends on their troubles, whereabouts or anything that may be of interest.

We all obsessively check our accounts to see if someone commented on our pictures, wrote a witty message on our wall, to check in on all of our favorite people, or recently, to see if someone commented on our notes sharing 25 pointless things about ourselves.

Time magazine published an article concerning this new trend on the site, a “25 things about you” note. It was posted 5 million times in one week, which is roughly 800,000 hours if each person spent 10 minutes on the note.

People have posted personal information that includes anything from, “I have recurring nightmares in which someone pulls off all my limbs which makes me scared to sleep,” to “I have a permanent cut in my tongue from having an expander from the orthodontist when I was ten. It cut it and it never healed. Gross, huh?”

No one really cares to know this information but it is a way to waste time and talk about yourself.

I personally cannot deny that I took part in the “25 things about you” shenanigans, which speaks volumes about how much time I waste on the site.

Facebook is a site where anyone can get on and spend an hour just looking at anything and everything; it updates you on everything your friends are doing and allows you to stalk just about anyone and learn every detail about them from their religious beliefs to what they did last Friday.

The site has progressed from a method to contact other college students to a time-sucking distraction from real life (prior to writing this article I clicked around Facebook to procrastinate.) These days there are so many different applications, groups, and even people that it is easy to get lost in the site and lose hours of your life.

In the spirit of the “25 things about me” survey, here are 15 things that make Facebook so addicting and consuming:

1. Bumper Stickers. Hundreds and hundreds of pages with funny anecdotes and sweet nothings that are insignificant but oh so fun to search through for hours.

2. Looking through the pictures that your friends, ex-boyfriends, or enemies have been tagged in.

3. Reading other people’s conversations through “wall posts” and basically stalking people in general.

4. Finding out who your friends, crushes and ex-flings are dating even if you don’t talk anymore or even act like you care, when in reality we always do.

5. Searching for a cause that you are passionate about so you can support it via Facebook, too.

6. Quizzes in which you find out which “The Office” character you are most like, or whether or not you will die alone.

7. Inviting mass amounts of people to events that you are hosting. Even President Barack Obama has used the site to announce events that he is supporting, i.e. community service day for MLK Jr.

8. Putting up pictures from your drunken – or not so drunken – adventures so everyone can see how much fun you have all the time.

9. Comparing your friends for who is a better dinner date or who you think would be better in bed.

10. Finding true love through the “best match” application.

11. Updating a status every day so everyone knows what crazy activities you are involved in.

12. Writing witty notes about yourself or funny life events that no one really reads.

13. Playing Snake, Football, Scramble, or any of the other pointless games that the site has to offer.

14. Parents having the chance to check in what their children are doing. I am pretty sure that over half my friends’ parents have a Facebook now in order to keep in touch with their children off at college.

15. Searching through high school networks to find old acquaintances that you never really liked in high school but want the satisfaction of knowing where they are in life in contrast to yourself.

Facebook has become a site used for many different reasons. It can be dangerous with all the information we tend to put on the site, but it is also a way that we can procrastinate or distract ourselves from the tasks at hand. When it comes down to it, Facebook is just a website, but it has somehow found a way into the English vernacular and society as a whole.