IStock Photo 11224736 © Yulia Butyrina

Resolved: in 2010 my Facebook profile will make people (especially my ex) sleepless with envy.

Along with vows to go to the gym and swear off candy and cigarettes, there are legions of Facebook users determined to improve the appearance of their virtual selves. Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace serve many functions, but one of the main ones is self-promotion. Who doesn’t want their life to appear glamorous, carefree, and filled with beautiful people—especially if you think your old high school competition, your new crush, or the guy (or girl) who so unwisely dumped you might be stalking?

Not to mention that cutie at the bar last night. Or the millions of (potentially attractive) strangers who could stumble across you with a click of the mouse. At 350 million and counting, Facebook users alone outnumber the population of the United States. The odds a US adult has a Facebook or MySpace account are 1 in 2.08. The odds are greatest for 18- to 34-year-olds, at 1 in 1.35 (74%)—about the same as the odds a man using a public restroom at New York City's Grand Central Station was seen washing his hands (1 in 1.36).

That’s a lot of people to impress. And Facebook users are an active bunch, many spending considerable amounts of time not only checking for messages (your wall can’t be blank) but also updating, uploading, and one-upping. One in ten makes a status update on any given day (“I can’t believe I got invited to the premier!”). The odds an adult with a Facebook or MySpace account will update his or her status at least once a day are 1 in 6.25, while the odds for the most active group, 18- to 34-year-olds, are 1 in 3.45. Together, these groups upload more than 2.5 billion photos every month.

Facebook being a social networking site, most of those photos are of the users and their friends, and therein lies the rub—and the opportunity. The surest way to look like you’re living an enviable life is to have candid shots of yourself (looking fine) at a (fancy, riotous, outrageous—pick your adjective) event tagged by someone else. Putting up your own photos, even if they’re great, just doesn’t have the same cache.

But then there are the awful pictures, the ones in which you appear disheveled, alone in a crowd, or (even worse) fatter than you really are. And although Facebook may at first have been an insular space protected from the prying eyes of outsiders, it’s old news by now that if you enjoy a drunken revelry on Saturday night, you might log in Monday morning and find yourself tagged in a host of compromising pictures. Not only do you run the risk of social humiliation, there’s also the chance the pictures will be seen by your parents, bosses, clients, and people who are (or were) about to interview you for a job. Hence the creation of a handy new Facebook application, Wisk-It (from the laundry folks), that helps you assemble the offending photos and politely request they be taken down—or at the very least, that you be untagged. It turns out there are still times when anonymity is a good thing.

But any remaining sense of Facebook privacy may have faded with the close of the decade. In December, 2009, the site announced changes to its privacy policy. Rather than basing their visibility on school or professional networks, users can now choose to display various components of their profiles and posts to friends, their friends’ friends, or the entire Internet.

The revised privacy policy explicitly states that what happens on Facebook doesn't necessarily stay on Facebook. This is truer than ever now that Facebook has made a deal with Google™ that allows the world's most popular search engine to turn up recent information from Facebook users.

Good thing you made that resolution.

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