How Facebook is taking over our lives

President Obama used it to get elected. Dell will recruit new hires with it. Microsoft's new operating system borrows from it. No question, Facebook has friends in high places. Can CEO Mark Zuckerberg make those connections pay off?

Facebook held no appeal for Peter Lichtenstein. The New Paltz, N.Y., resident had checked out so-called social networking sites before, and he wasn't impressed. ("MySpace," he recalls, "was ridiculous.")

A chiropractor and acupuncturist, Lichtenstein was already a member of a few professional web-based user groups. The last thing he needed was another message box to check.

Then a buddy posted a link to photos from a trip to Thailand and India on his Facebook page and flatly refused to distribute them any other way. The friend's assumption: Duh - everyone's on Facebook.

And so Lichtenstein, 57, recently became an official member of the Facebook army, 175 million strong and, Facebook says, growing at the astounding rate of about five million new users a week, making it a rare bright spot in a dismal economy. If Facebook were a country, it would have a population nearly as large as Brazil's. It even edges out the U.S. television audience for Super Bowl XLIII, which drew a record-setting 152 million eyeballs.

But these days the folks fervently updating their Facebook pages aren't just tech-savvy kids: The college and post-college crowd the site originally aimed to serve (18- to 24-year-olds) now makes up less than a quarter of users. The newest members - the ones behind Facebook's accelerating growth rate - are more, ahem, mature types like Lichtenstein, who never thought they'd have the time or inclination to overshare on the web. It's just that Facebook has finally started to make their busy lives a little more productive - and a lot more fun.

Try logging in to quickly check a message, and you may find yourself scrolling through new baby photos from that guy who used to sit next to you in Mr. Peterson's English class. How did such a goofball end up with such a cute baby? And how'd he find you here anyhow? Soon you're checking the friends you have in common. This addictive quality keeps Facebook's typical user on the site for an average of 169 minutes a month, according to ComScore. Compare that with Google News, where the average reader spends 13 minutes a month checking up on the world, or the New York Times website, which holds on to readers for a mere ten minutes a month.

The "stickiness" of the site is a key part of 24-year-old CEO Mark Zuckerberg's original plan to build an online version of the relationships we have in real life. Offline we bump into friends and end up talking for hours. We flip through old photos with our family. We join clubs. Facebook lets us do all that in digital form. Yet we also present different faces to the different people in our lives: An "anything goes" page we share with pals might not be appropriate for office mates - or for the moms and grandmas who increasingly are joining the site. Basic privacy controls today allow users to share varying degrees of information with friends, but when I recently met with Zuckerberg in Palo Alto, he waxed philosophical about eventually giving a user the ability to have a different Facebook personality for each Facebook friendship, a sort of online version of the line from Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself": "I contain multitudes."

His ultimate goal is less poetic - and perhaps more ambitious: to turn Facebook into the planet's standardized communication (and marketing) platform, as ubiquitous and intuitive as the telephone but far more interactive, multidimensional - and indispensable. Your Facebook ID quite simply will be your gateway to the digital world, Zuckerberg predicts. "We think that if you can build one worldwide platform where you can just type in anyone's name, find the person you're looking for, and communicate with them," he told a German audience in January, "that's a really valuable system to be building."

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