Clues for the Facebook Clueless

Okay, so you're new to Facebook. We understand. What? You've been on Facebook since 2007? And you did THAT? This blog is for you, the Facebook Clueless.

1. Target, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and any other company you see is not, I repeat **NOT** going to give you a $1,000 gift card for being one of the first 20,000 people to join a fan page. Seriously, think about it. That's TWENTY MILLION DOLLARS they'd be giving away to anyone with the handful of brain cells necessary to click "Become a Fan." Not going to happen. Sorry.
2. There are no magical pages, groups, or applications out there that let you "See Who is Browsing Your Profile." They are all fake. Every single one of them.
3. Any fan page that requires you to "send this invite to twenty of your friends" is getting you to do their spam work for them.
4. Any page that has 50,000 fans and zero posts on the wall -- FAKE. Run away. Seriously -- if you were giving away Best Buy gift certificates, wouldn't you want people posting on your wall about how awesome you are? They disable the wall because no one ever got squat from them.
5. If you have to "copy-paste this Javascript into your browser window to complete the application process" -- red flag. If you actually DO that, maybe you deserve to have your computer infested with viruses. Duh.
6. Facebook is not going to "start charging $14.95/month on [insert date here]." That kind of thing has been around since the dawn of the Internet. It's as old as the "Nigerian Prince" email. AIM, Yahoo! Mail, MySpace, Facebook... all of them have had people forwarding angry messages about how they're going to leave if they start charging. None of them have been true. Even if they were about to start charging, is joining a fan page or group really going to change the minds of the people in charge?
7. Snopes is your friend. Bookmark it. Heck, memorize the link (it's not that long). Always use it before you post something about the latest Amber Alert, Bill Cosby political views, or story about "Obama eats babies." Do some fact-checking, people.
8. Here's one that was actually clever. A fan page created some realistic looking images of people commenting "Wow! I can't believe this worked!" for some free prize giveaway. There were icons, people's names, and the works. Only problems? It wasn't on the "Wall" section where people would actually post messages. Oh, and none of the people had last names displayed. Oh, and none of the links (including the people's names) were clickable -- the whole thing was a JPG that someone had Photoshopped to look like testimonials. When you clicked on the actual Wall, there were no posts.
9. Just because we went to the same high school, that doesn't make us friends. Did we even have any classes together?
10. Drunk FB status updating is the new drunk texting or drunk dialing. Except that instead of just an ex-girlfriend seeing/hearing it, 500 friends and family members see how stupid you are.
11. You don't HAVE to post every achievement in FarmVille or Mafia Wars. It's optional.
12. If I don't live in your city, I'm probably not going to come to your concert.
13. People with bad spelling, punctuation, and/or grammar deserve to be mocked with sarcastic comments. This means you.
14. Not everyone shares your ultra-liberal or ultra-conservative viewpoint. It's okay to have such a viewpoint, of course. Just don't couple it with a "I can't believe anyone else out there doesn't share the same point of view as me. Clearly, you're an idiot if you believe something else!" attitude.
15. If you post a picture of your child, favorite cartoon character or anything other than your face, don't tell me who you are, we have no friends in common, and I haven't called you by name in the last 48 hours, don't be surprised when I ignore your friend request.

Hopefully this helps. Feel free to submit additional "clues" -- I will give proper credit to you. Oh, and if three or more people forward this to you, maybe your friends are trying to tell you something.