Challenge is to use Facebook and not be used by it

I'm trying to figure out what, if anything, Facebook or other social networking sites will bring to the important aspects of my life once my weird enjoyment of its more trivial features, like FarmVille, wears thin.

I'm also curious to know what hidden costs I'll incur from my time there. Like a few million other Facebook users who've already clamored and growled, I do worry about protecting my privacy and controlling who knows what about me, based on my activities there.

I don't post my year of birth, my mother's maiden name or my home address. I don't say "the entire family's in Oahu and my house is empty and inviting" on my status updates.

Having mastered some of the do-nots, I'm now test-driving it in various ways to see what does work for me.

Tuesday, I tried something radically different. I actually reached three people who I needed for a story by finding them on Facebook and "interviewed" them. A Facebook interview is certainly not as warm and fuzzy as a real conversation, but it was, in fact, pretty quick and worked quite well. I didn't have to figure out phone numbers or the best time to call. And it was easy to copy the quotes over into the story.

It's also a pretty good way to get leads on issues that interest me. After the Haiti earthquake, a big group of LDS returned missionaries who had served there coordinated efforts to help and shared their news on a Facebook page. I tapped into that group for my work.

I, without any qualification, love the fact that I am back in touch with about 70 people I misplaced on my journey through the last few hectic decades. I'm having dinner this weekend with a woman who was one of my dearest friends in high school 30 years ago. She settled on one side of the country, and I settled on the other. I doubt we would have found each other again very easily.

I am also enjoying eavesdropping via Facebook on the friendship between my oldest daughter and her cousins, who we don't see nearly often enough. I've seen in action the application of my girl's ultra-wry, very dry sense of humor.

Still, a presentation by a Facebook executive at a conference earlier this year left me decidedly uneasy. He was pitching the many ways that the site could target advertising quite precisely, using information that users might not even realize they were sharing.