Do you remember when Facebook was cool? You waited and waited until BU generated your college email so you could sign up for an account. Before Facebook, there was only MySpace, where creepy guys hit on you and unsigned bands wanted you to check out their crappy demos.

Social networking and media tools grew with us over the past four years. I’m about to graduate with a MySpace page, a Twitter account, a Facebook profile and two blogs. I’m told I need to create a LinkedIn page, stat! Plus maybe a Flickr account to upload the photos I take on my post-grad jaunt to Australia. I GChat and Facebook message along with tired old AIM. While students in the College of Communication tend to be tech- and Internet-savvy, that’s a ton of passwords for me to remember.

Facebook and Twitter have come up a lot in conversation recently and since I’m feeling all retrospective and nostalgic, I’m going to look at these past four years based on my Internet use.

I grew up just north of Chicago and BU was the only out of state school that accepted me. Thus, I really didn’t know anyone when I came to campus except for the few people I’d met at summer orientation. Like most new freshmen, I diligently tagged pictures from the summer before college and posted all of my classes to see who else was in them. That list became even more important when I was out for days puking from the norovirus that hit BU’s dining halls in my second semester, and I needed coursework. I realized a while ago that no one posts their classes anymore. I wonder why that is?

Around the same time that I stopped trusting the dining halls, I discovered the phenomenon of Facebook Stalking. Keep in mind, Facebook was about a year old when I logged on for the first time, so this was new and exciting (I think)! My friends and I looked up people we met at parties, people we made out with in Allston basements who, without combing mutual friends’ pools, we would never have remembered. It was totally innocent.

We in J-school learn about the Internet and perceived privacy, that for the most part what a person puts on the Internet is fair game, particularly posts on social networking sites. The Facebook Terms of Service fiasco a few months ago shined a big light for those who didn’t see the obvious: The Internet isn’t private! (Though the ownership quandary was completely legitimate.)

But four years ago, it certainly seemed like it. I felt awkward bringing up information from mutual friends’ wall-to-walls, even though it was right there for all to see, particularly after the invention of the News Feed.

Today’s Facebook finds us playing a “Scrabble”-type game, posting videos and various other things on each others’ walls and even updating our statuses from phones and Twitter. That college-only community has multiplied to include extended family and colleagues from work. In a way, it’s better that Facebook has opened up because people are more aware of what they post and who sees it. If I tweet a link on Twitter, yes, you can tell me how awesome it was.

Seriously, don’t judge, but I think this muddle is best summed up by Drew Barrymore in He’s Just Not That Into You:

“I had this guy leave me a voicemail at work so I called him at home and then he emailed me to my BlackBerry and so I texted to his cell and now you just have to go around checking all these different portals just to get rejected by seven different technologies. It’s exhausting!”

Yes, Drew, it is. In my section of Feature Writing (JO309), we joked about friends’ Facebook and MySpace-fueled breakups. It happens.

But, as my friends and peers get ready to graduate and some to depart, social networking seems more important now than when we were all 20 minutes apart. People I really care about are going to L.A., to Europe, to Australia. I’m going to want to see their pictures, post videos on their walls and send them pixelated, corporate-sponsored gifts.

With friends gone, I’ll take anything I can get.