The final battle between myspace and facebook may rage for generations to come. While many have chosen their side and will defend it to the bitter end, your workplace procrastination time has never been more highly sought after.

Then of course there are those who scowl and cringe at the very thought of releasing their precious personal data into the hands of (faceless) e-marketing giants. Conspiracy theorists – many of whom are members of the sites themselves – question the good intentions of social networking and third party developers, leaving the great unwashed with some tricky decisions to ponder. Are the designers of scrabulous just compiling a massive database of etymologist personal data? To face or not to face?

Once plugged into social networking sites we are then faced with a myriad of other difficult concerns – Vampire or Werewolf? FunBlog or SuperWall? I recently had the satisfaction of tearing down most of my walls after suffering a severe bout of facebook claustrophobia. And yet, one by one, they are rebuilding… (I now have two, no ceiling – open plan living is very much in the mode) .

Then there’s the recent story I spotted on CNet about the student who changed her name on facebook as a social experiment. How long would it take for people to start calling her by a different name? Then she got tired of waiting and tried to revert back to her actual name. And facebook won’t let her.

So now she’s stuck in the digital world forever as someone new. Apparently some of her real life acquaintances have started calling her by the new name, having forgotten who she once was. Seems like her social experiment has all gone horribly wrong! The power of facebook is such that if it’s on the wall - it’s true for life…

And while the poor young lady in question might be scratching her head over how seriously her peers take her facebook status updates and name change – what strikes me as most interesting about this story is how seriously facebook are taking her request to change back. They have a strict policy on user-ID which implies (not suprisingly) that someone, somewhere is keeping a very close watch on the 50 Million users’ personal data. And they don’t like it when you rock the boat…

It’s all very intense for a site which epitomises time-wasting silliness (i am a level 17 purpabit if anyone cares to meet me in the battlegrounds for a duel)…

Personally I have used a pseudonym on facebook from the day I signed up, not out of any conspiracy fear but from a simple desire to be that much more anonymous. Of course there are privacy settings but to me, it is a matter of principle.

I may yet live to rue that decision…