While I’m somewhat mystified by the ubiquity of Facebook in some people’s lives (and its seemingly endless list of add-on applications), I admit to using it sparingly, mostly to keep in touch with a dozen friends or so from the East Coast, some of whom I haven’t seen since high school. However, today’s report in PC World was somewhat alarming, since I hadn’t realized Facebook’s Beacon feature was tracking my online activities outside of Facebook. Thankfully, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg realized this was a real violation of privacy, and wrote in a blog post, “We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it.”

Harvard dropout makes millions, apologizes.

This is what happens when the demand for (or curiosity about) online social networking turns into big money, I guess. (Microsoft recently paid $240 million for a 1.6% share of Facebook.) Despite Zuckerberg’s correction, I’m now less than thrilled to log on and see what kind of movies the guy I sat three seats behind in chemistry class is into. Maybe it’s time to pick up the phone.