The Great Facebook Freakout of 2006 (but hey, it’s giving me good free music)

So all you college kids (or slightly-out-of-college kids who worked at a university, like me, and thus have access) who are on Facebook, perhaps you’ve seen the Apple Students Group that gives you a 25-song sampler free each Monday? The first week I saw was electronica, most of which was drivel, but last week’s (“alternative”) and this week’s (“rock”) have some decent free tracks in them. I don’t know if there is a hidden catch somewhere, but if you join up (assuming you are already part of the Facebook cult) you can get free songs like:

“Another One Goes By” -
The Walkmen (from A Hundred Miles Off)

“Crawl” – Pistol Star
(from the album of the same name)

“The Man Who Came To Stay” – Babyshambles
(even though Pete Doherty is disintegrating before our eyes, and is a total disaster, some of his music still strikes me the right way) (b-side from Down in Albion)

“Fall At Your Feet” – Magnet
(from The Tourniquet)

“Letters (Acoustic)” – Stroke 9
(from Cafe Cuts: A Collection of Acoustic Favorites)

“Devil” – Stereophonics
(from the Live From Dakota album)

There are also great free tracks from Fuel favorites Brandi Carlile, The Black Keys, Rocky Votolato, Pete Yorn, and The Format.

I thought it was actually really, really funny last week how Facebook singlehandedly caused more political action among college students than the last three election years combined: If you read the articles (or blog articles), Facebook decided to incorporate a new “news feed” into each users homepage and a “mini-feed” into each users individual profile which shows EVERYTHING you’ve done on Facebook since mid-August (unless you manually remove it).

Within a day or two, over 40,000 (!!) college students had joined the official petition to Facebook to remove the data or to give students greater controls over what information was released, as well as hundreds of smaller protest groups. The one I chose was “DAMN Imma need 4 Facebook to Stay out My Business!! Mini-Feed My Ass,” because a) it made me laugh and b) the one I wanted to start was actually too long of a title for Facebook.

It was going to be called, “To Your Face I’m Totally All ‘The New Facebook Mini-Feed Sucks!’ But Secretly I Have Been Checking Facebook Even More Than Ever, Dammit.” If you’re honest, you would have joined it too.

Also, definitely check out the “New-Facebook-Is-Creepy Mix” because, as Taylor says, stalking is only fun when you have to work for it.