As far back as 2003, I remember hearing about something called Facebook.

(Note: As far back as 2003? How old am I? Oh wait … that’s right — never mind, let’s just move on.)

What I remember about it mostly was that it made no sense. So … you logged onto this thing with your old college email — at the time, it was only for college students and employees of certain businesses using the network — and … then what? You told people what you were doing? Why would anyone care?

It’s rather incredible to look at that from the perspective of January 2010. Facebook and other social media sites (including Twitter, the most bafflingly popular useless service that I can’t stop using for some reason) are a nationwide — pardon me, worldwide — obsession. Entire studies are currently taking place to determine exactly how much time we’re wasting on a daily basis on Facebook to settle arguments like, “Should I wear the red dress or the black one?” or, “Who would win in a fight between Batman and Spider Man?”

I’m not sure what exactly was the tipping point for Facebook — I didn’t start using it until sometime in 2005, when the site officially lifted any restrictions about who could use it (let’s just say that was an uneventful weekend at my house). I do know that it had probably jumped well over the shark long before my mom ever logged on for the first time (the moment when even I finally realized, “This is getting out of hand”).

What’s amazing is the number of people who still don’t seem to understand how to use the site properly — or, better yet, what not to do with it. Specifically, if you attend a party at your buddy’s house while the parents are out of town, then post photos of yourself looking glassy-eyed and lost on Facebook, and everybody winds up in trouble with parents/teachers/cops … um, let’s just say you were asking for it, dude.

(And by the way, you can’t play the “invasion of privacy” card here — stuff you put on the Web isn’t private. And if you think it is, in the words of a friend of mine, go back to Happy Candy Bear Island.)

Not that the site is all bad, necessarily. I would have completely missed the scope and the severity of the recent Haiti earthquake, except people on Facebook wouldn’t stop chattering about it. Last year during the Iranian elections, when information was more tightly controlled than your average Lane Kiffin press conference … those networking sites (Twitter mostly) kept leaking word to the rest of the world (OK, so nobody knew what was true and what wasn’t — it was still neat).

And, as a professor I know recently argued, time wasted on Facebook, Twitter and so forth is no different than time wasted doing anything else.

“The time we waste playing on the computer is time we used to waste at the water cooler or the coffee machine or on a smoke break,” he said. “We just found a different way of doing what we’ve always done.”

True enough. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go enter a new argument in the “red dress vs. black dress” debate.

I like the black one. It brings out my eyes. Um, her eyes.