Every year or so, some old roommate or a close friend's fiancee or somebody drags me onto yet another social networking site like a kid pulled off the bleachers at a middle school dance. This year, it was the very popular Facebook, one of the web's hottest private properties, which Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has appraised somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 billion clams.

From my charming, handsome Facebook profile, you can get a pretty solid idea of my consumer habits, or at least the habits of the consumer I want you to think I am (Do I secretly love Nicholas Sparks novels? Do I burn through fungal creams? I'll never te-- I mean NO! No. Of course not!). I spill all my beans -- what I do with my free time, what books I read, what CDs I dig on, what TV shows I'd TiVo ... if I had a TiVo ... or a television. And I've never been private about it. Through the MySpaces and the Friendsters -- even ten years ago on my HotWired.com member page (remember these?) -- all that choice information has always been there since the beginning.

And, lucky me, so has the University of Phoenix. Why, when I log on to Facebook in the year 2007, is glorious old UoP still hassling me to go get my GED or whatever learn-at-home hustle it's running, particularly when the actual, genuine university that graduated me way back when is right there on the page, pulsing in Carolina blue beneath my favorite hilarious and insightful quotes?