The FacePhases.

Facebook. You know it. It's THE social network. 

One fine day, sitting at home and ignoring that Chemistry textbook on my table, the Aristotle in me took over. 

If you observe idly (which is my favorite pastime), an average dude's social nework life can be classified into four broad phases:

 FacePhase 1:

You create a facebook profile with no profile picture, a fake year of birth and zero friends. It was either your friends pressuring you, or you wanted to give it a shot ("What IS it with this bookface, anyway?"). It's extremely boring, and poking is completely alien. Now, there are two ways this could wind up: 1. you end up bored and log in so rarely that you forget your password (thisisfacebook) OR 2. you keep going at it, and watch your life being taken over.

FacePhase 2: 

Change profile picture to Justin Beiber/ Justin Timberlake/ Rob Pattinson/  INSERT GAY HOLLYWOOD STAR as you think it's 'kool'.You receive friend requests from other misguided 'kool dudes'. (All the America THEY know are the stereoypical Americans from local movies, or AXN.) Feel encouraged, start sending more friend requests. Get accepted into the gay hollywooders community.

Now come the status updates. You start up by copying some dude's emo status, and posting it as your own: Life is nothing without your love/ I don't wanna love, because it hurts/ (INSERT RANDOM STATUS CONTAINING THE WORDS 'PAIN, LOVE AND HURTS' IN VARYING COMBINATIONS). Then you pester every online dude to comment on it. ('Dei, please comment on my status da!'). Recieve comments like 'correct da machi', 'you say the truth in life', etc,etc. Feel more gloated, more emo statuses. 

By this stage you would probably have sent a thousand friend requests to all the girls you could possibly could. One or two get accepted. More gloat. More emo.

 FacePhase 3:

Now the mania REALLY kicks in (read 4-5 hours on facebook per day). Your Farmville farm is fertile, Mafia is growing and the Cafe brings in customers.  Your wall is filled with " ____ needs you to help him fertilize his farm", "____'s Mafia needs more men", etc.

By this time, you gather up the courage to upload a personal picture. It's probably a crop of some group photo you chanced upon, or some picture taken manually through a cell phone.

Notes. You see  X gaining popularity through that Note he wrote about some exaggerated incident. You try writing you own. Tag all your friends in it. Pester them online dudes again. "Hey check out my Note! :link:"

BTW, till this time, pronunciation marks and capital letters are completely alien to you, and an excess of exclamatory marks is absolutely necessary to stress the importance of the sentence.

FacePhase 4: 

FacePhase 3 may last from anything between 6 months to one and a half years. After those months of comment-pestering, girl-befriending, etc, etc, you finally get some sense knocked into you. You realise the importance of punctuations after that embarrassing incident (whore you?).

Zynga fades away, online time reduces, you realize how much time you're wasting.

But you still have to ABSOLUTELY update that you won 5K in a science quiz.