Facebook - Could become a bad tattoo!!!

Remember that night when you got really drunk, stumbled into the shady tattoo parlour and engraved - "Michael Jackson is my hero" after listening to Thriller, onto your chest - of course you don't remember that, you were too drunk.

But now imagine if your best friend posted pictures of that incident on Facebook, you laughed it off, regretted it the next day, a few months and a couple thousand dollars later, you had it lazered off. But those incriminating pictures of you still linger on, on Facebook and who knows where else on the web - Flickr, Webshots or Photobucket.

Most pictures don't have such a crazy story behind them, but the evidence left behind is just as bad if not worse.

Lately there have been tons of stories of promising/potential employers scouting the Facebook, MySpace profiles of their applicants, only to find weird and crazy pictures which makes them second guess their candidacy. People have been denied jobs because of their mannerisms on social networking websites.

Another trend that has popped up is the debate regarding the 'relationship status' on a Facebook profile. Just like in reality, people have to play it cool in the Facebook dimension as well. Setting the status to 'dating' or 'in a relationship with' too early might scare the other person. The relationship status is a symbol of commitment and it needs to be handled as delicately as the real-life relationship.

So the next time you post pictures of the party where you got naked and did something incriminating, think of the consequences it might have in the future - if you post those pictures publicly.

What about the future - 10-20 years down the road, you've forgotten about the pictures and conversations that you had with that high-school fling and your kids find them? How are you going to explain to that, when on the other hand you are trying to tell them drugs and drinking is bad?