The Rice University Neologisms Database

Adding someone as a friend on The Facebook; browsing through The Facebook From the noun Facebook ‘an online directory of college students in which you post a profile and can ask people to be your virtual friends’. This usage has drastically grown in popularity since college kids will generally look for the shortest possible way to say something. Facebook (which in an example of clipping is no longer referred to as The Facebook) is an integral part of many students’ lives, and is often employed as a means of procrastination. Facebook has its uses – keeping in touch with friends from other universities, looking up a friend’s email address or AIM screenname – but can often be a black hole for your time: you can always read your friends’ profiles (especially if they were updated recently), look for more people who graduated from your high school and add them to your friends list, or upload more pictures to your online Facebook photo album. Now Facebook has come to be used as a verb to mean browsing on Facebook or adding someone to your list of friends on Facebook. Facebooking is in keeping with the general trend of social detachment among adolescents and young adults: instead of communicating with someone face-to-face, there is now one more way to communicate with them via computer.