Facebook - add me as a friend.

Have you ever been in one of those situations where you've asked someone a question, when you already know the answer from Facebook?

That girl you bump into in the street. Oh so you have a boyfriend now? Knowing full well she does after quietly perusing her Facebook page for hours, berating the fact that you should have asked her out first when you had the chance.

'Oh, so what's he called?' you innocently ask her, despite knowing that he is called Tom, aged 21, lives in Manchester, likes cricket, diving and Charlton Athletic FC and goes by the nickname 'Bugsy' to his closest friends. She doesn't know what's going through your mind, if she did would she even touch you with a bargepole? Would she even look up when crossing you in the street? or would she forever label you as the weird guy who stalked her and her boyfriend on Facebook?

Now you and your friends might be shouting a resounding 'YES' as the computer screen, but this is exactly what Facebook was designed for. If you haven't seen the film The Social Network, which documents the rise of what was initially called 'The Facebook', one large reason why the website is created was to establish whether a girl was 'single' or 'in a relationship' - and this information is now freely available on everyone's Facebook page.

Surely browsing her photos is merely an extension of this? You can imagine the thought process. Now, is X girl single? Yes. Hurdle one completed. Now, I wonder if girl X is as beautiful as I first thought. Yes. Hurdle too is also completely brushed aside. Now, I wonder what girl X looks like in a swimsuit... I wonder if she'll age well? As you furiously try and find her mother in a photo. I put this to you, at which stage is this stalking?

Is this perverse, is this creepy, or is it just the natural progression of what Facebook was initially intended for?

The thing is it's so terrifyingly easy to do. You can be browsing a friends holiday photos, quickly get distracted by a person they'd met abroad in the photo, click through to their profile and soon enough you're going through their sister's cousin's step-mother's adoptive daugher's wedding photos in Trinidad and Tobago unearthing a untold amount of strangers up on your screen. Little do those in the photo know that they're currently being spied upon from someone they've never met in the South East of England.

The thing is, it really is a great tool on checking on old school mates. Whether those girls who you knew back at primary school were pregnant. You know the ones who were always around the boys and would randomly pick one of us every day to give them a kiss. Or whether that guy who always sat at the front of the class got a girlfriend yet. Or whether the guy who always used to come in in a dress had had that operation yet. Things like this make Facebook great.

Facebook brings up very different problems. I was watching an episode of Traffic Cops on the Beeb the other day, and a fifty year old woman was pretending to be her thirty year old daughter in order to hide the fact that she only had a provisional driving licence. The name of the daugher was released freely into the public domain not bleeped out, no nothing. I twigged that the name was a bit of an odd one, so I thoughtlessly tapped it into Facebook to see what I'd find.

Sure enough the daughter popped up and in her main photo she was hugging her mum who I'd just seen being arrested for wasting police time. Isn't this a bit of an invasion of privacy? Or should people just learn to click the 'Make Profile Private' button flashing in their security settings. Or should the BBC learn to not publish names of people that haven't actually committed a crime?

Isn't this so horribly creepy, but then isn't this also the reason people sign onto Facebook - in order to inform those around them of their personal details?

Facebook will remain to be a stalkers paradise, where teenagers and twentysomethings will always push boundaries as to what information they can find out on girls, boys and people they see on TV. At least, this is what my friends tell me they do...

Dave is clearly excited after he's realised Maggie from number 53 is in fact single, a virgo and looks great in a one-piece.