Below are the 3 most recent journal entries recorded in funnystatus' InsaneJournal:

Sunday, February 20th, 2011
4:35 pm	I Play Facebook Games but Don't Even Like Them! Mafia Wars is a pretty popular game on Facebook, in case you haven’t come across it before. And I am pretty sure that Facebook doesn’t require an introduction to anybody these days. Anyway, I got hooked on Mafia Wars and have been playing a few minutes a day for a couple years. To be honest the game is pretty silly but I whenever I check my Facebook throughout the day I will go play and click around for a few minutes. At first I ignored all the games when they originally started popping up on Facebook. I have a few video games I love for the playstation but honestly I couldn’t see how any game that could be played on Facebook would be fun or decent. I usually hate casual games and am not even the type of person who plays flash games online or anything like that. Still, every day my Facebook wall would get flooded with game updates my friends were playing, invitations to play with them, Facebook status and everything else. Eventually I gave in and tried Mafia Wars for a while. Mafia Wars is almost stupidly simple but it takes a strange hold over you where by the time you have figured out how to play it has already become habitual. After you spend a week or so playing the game, checking it out so to speak, you are already at the point where you start playing without thinking about it. It really is that mindless. I would open the game and start to click around and be done without ever making a concious decision to do it. I say “click around,” because that’s really all the game consists of. It is time based, so you earn a certain number of points every hour or so depending on what your character owns in the game as far as businesses, assets and other income goes. You can then spend those points to get gear to complete missions or buy more assets. If you have ever played any of the Sims games, you can imagine something like that except really dumb and with a Goodfella's theme. Then I'll post a Mafia Wars related Facebook status in the hopes that someone will help me in the game. Having been a victim of one of these terrible games, I feel it is my civic duty to advise everyone out there to stay away. It is such a counterproductive and pointless activity and it really isn't even enjoyable. It is just a few lazy minutes of nothingness, just a step ahead of brain numbing boredom. Every time I log in to play I think to myself at some point “This is so dumb. What am I doing?” That is the fair and honest truth. On the other hand, maybe I just picked the wrong game and I need to give Farmville a try instead! (Comment on this)
4:33 pm	Who Doesn’t Love a Hilarious Facebook Status Update? If you’re online reading this I am sure you have heard of Facebook and chances are you have an account there, too. Facebook is one of the biggest websites online and one of the primary destinations for a large portion of internet traffic as a whole. I have relatives all over the U.S. and Europe I connect with on Facebook who, otherwise, I would probably rarely talk to. It is great at bring people together. It is funny how people have evolved in their usage of Facebook since it first came around. People make friends and romantic partners through Facebook by looking at local people they’ve never met and checking out there pictures, facebook status for the day and “poking” or sending messages. It is even a great way to network professionally with people from your industry. Besides being just a social network, Facebook has grown to be a marketplace and gaming site, among other things. Facebook users plan and promote events, create groups to network with like minded people, and have posted billions of updates in Facebook's history. You build a friend base and then tell them what you want to share. It can be so simple but many of us have ways to get pretty creative with our updates. Some people put a lot of effort into being able to post a funny facebook status or some weird obscure fact that is unusual. Advertising on Facebook has gotten massive. Although the ads are very tame and neat compared to many other web company's sites, they are always there and with the massive, world wide user base there is a lot of money to be made. Almost every major company or corporation has an official facebook page, and it is such a part of daily life that many companies even promote their facebook pages on TV commercials and through advertising on other places around the web. Their advertising system is also popular because marketers are able to target potential customers very accurately by using the vast amount of information people fill out in their profiles. It has often been called a marketers dream because consumers on facebook display their age, gender, hobbies, workplace, movies and music they like, and much more. If you are new to facebook then you will likely get lost in it for hours as so many other people have with the games and social interaction available there. However, remember to be careful as well because it can be dangerous to make too much information public. Facebook has caught some criticism for its privacy settings, which sometimes have been made too confusing and cryptic for people to navigate. (Comment on this)
4:30 pm	Facebook Privacy Controls Facebook has gotten a lot of criticism over the last couple years for sporadic and confusing updates made to its privacy settings area. They received even more attention when they updated theirs terms and conditions to include a passage claiming legal ownership of all the photos, Facebook status updates and other content user generated content. Lately the controversy has calmed somewhat because Facebook fixed some of these matters, but privacy still continues to be an issue for Facebook users. Part of the problem with privacy on Facebook is the nature of the site itself. Without giving some information about yourself out to the world there is really no way to successfully utilize Facebook in the first place. Everyone must have friends to read there little status updates and their friends have friends who may read them as well, depending on privacy settings. Social groups on Facebook overlap constantly. A diagram would look something like millions of spider webs all smashed together, where each web is one person and their friends list. The point here is that, basically, if you are going to use the service at all you are giving up some degree of privacy. Unfortunately, we have to be careful about this because there are dangerous people in the world and some of them have computers. Obviously since we can’t just pick the weird one’s out individually, the only thing to do is only trust people that you know, or that your trusted friend’s know, and block everyone else. Therein lies the problem with privacy on facebook. It is almost impossible to completely privatize everything to only your friends. If you aren't careful with your privacy settings, Facebook likes to update your friends pages when they comment on your status, usually including your own status at the top. That means all their friends can see the update too. It is shocking to me how many Facebookers don't even protect their photos from strangers, let alone all the other information some obsessive users meticulously enter into their profile, editing and updating it as they go on. If you don’t believe it, go facebook surfing. Click a friend’s profile, surf to one of their friends who you don’t know, and keep going like that as deep as you can. You could surf pages of people all over the world in minutes by doing this. It is really amazing how comprehensive and international the Facebook userbase has grown to be. You may have to hit the back button here and there as some people do protect their settings, but it is amazing how many don’t. At the end of the day the only way you can really protect the information you want kept private is to simply not put it on the internet at all. Assume that nothing on the web is truly private, and 99% of the time you will be correct. The best way to keep strangers and weirdo’s from getting your information is to just not put any of it out there in the first place. (Comment on this)