I love time-wasters.

A friend recently began doing more on Facebook, leaving MySpace behind for the most part. I've had a long-neglected Facebook profile and his new activity has me taking another look at the site. While the Facebook crowd is considerably more sedate than the bunch at MySpace (remember, you're still talking about high-school and college students, so the standards are pretty low--but I've yet to see a news organization show a Facebook profile of a suspected murderer, a MySpace specialty), the application has better privacy settings than MySpace, permits less tweaking of profile code (the sort that leads to unviewable page colors on MySpace), and allows add-on application goodies to your profile.

Some of these applications are pretty fun, and make Facebook more enjoyable, even if it has fewer users and such tight restrictions on interactions. You can throw virtual sheep at friends, sign petitions, challenge pals to trivia quiz contests, and display your book or music collection. At first, I got sucked in to a geography quiz game, wasting ten minutes at a shot trying to remember what the flag of Bhutan looks like or precisely where the capitol of Côte d'Ivoire is.

Then my friend installed a virtual CD rack, showing some of his favorite CDs. there went a couple of weeks of my free time! You have probably noticed by my listening journal that I own a lot of CDs. I'm a bit proud of my collection and this application is exactly the wrong thing for me. You see, they have roughly 400,000 users and they rank the users according to who has the most disks... While I'm not the most competitive guy, it was suddenly important for me to be ranked in the top 100 users. That meant entering, manually, my entire CD collection, plus the vinyl. Yes, I'm now in the top 100! What a good use of my time, no?

The application also ranks albums by how many users have them. I'll probably comment on that at some time in the future. Fascinating stuff.

CDs listened to today:

• Aaron Copland: Symphonic Ode
• Libertines: Up The Bracket
• Kevin Puts: Dark Vigil
• Jennifer Higdon: City Scape
• New Order: Substance
• The Joggers: Solid Guild