What's more important than having fun in college? Making sure everyone knows about it the next day. Oh yeah, and grades... but that kind of ruined the punchline.

The "oh man, guess what I did last weekend!" story has a long and colorful history, especially for the undergraduate crowd, but the Facebook-era has added a new wrinkle: visual aids. Now you can share your weekend adventures with 500 of your closest friends. And maybe your future employers and admissions committees.

By now everyone is pretty familiar with the drill: admissions directors and employers do look at social networking sites to check out candidates' backgrounds. So while you may want all your buddies from the frisbee team to see your keg stand from Saturday night, that picture won't make quite the same impression with your potential boss.
Pick your poison: whether you use Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Linkedin, the problem remains the same. Once an image is up there, no matter how private you may think your profile is, someone somewhere can stumble upon posted pictures. While this old news for many, this issue came up again last month involving a member of Barack Obama's staff.

The president-elect's speechwriter Jon Favreau was photographed at a party groping a life-size cutout of incoming Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And where did this hilarious image show up? Facebook of course. Even though the images were only up for a few hours, the damage was done and the photos were all over news blogs soon after.

Clinton's camp made light of the photos, joking about Favreau's "obvious interest in the State Department," demonstrating not only the increasingly goodwill with Obama's team, but also possibly showing a developing understanding that an individual's private life may have very little to do with their public performance. Employers may develop an empathy towards Facebook-users, knowing that a little harmless fun never hurt anyone's job performance. However, when you're making a first impression, it's better to be safe than sorry. To that end, Slate e-magazine recently published some guidelines for Facebook profiles to protect the user's reputation.

Some of the more useful tips included using an abbreviated version of your name, for example a first initial and last name. Also, user's should really take advantage of the limited profile functions that Facebook offers to curb friends' access to profiles. It's not rude to limit someone's access: it may be self-preservation!

My personal rule for Facebook friends is that if I would pass someone on the street and not say hello, they probably don't need to be updated on my social life. It may feel rude to turn down someone's friendship request, but Miss Manners didn't really cover this particular subject, so for now the etiquette is open to interpretation. Limit your friends, limit your pictures to the non-incriminating and non-blush-worthy and when all else fails, start over. Deactivate your account and start from scratch: this makes an especially clean break for those moving from the college world into the "real" world.