So I've learned a fair amount during this little experiment of mine (including apparently the fact that I do actually have close friends).
For one thing, Facebook really sucks. It's full of really stupid people, and while I trust my friends to not be asshats, I can't trust them to not have asshat friends.
The whole thing is designed to be as cumbersome as possible with regards to anything that doesn't relate to data-mining. Things that should be incredibly simple are made annoying as hell. Only seeing what your friends post, as opposed to what they liked or commented on, should be a tick away. Instead it has to be done by segregating people into groups, thus expanding the data gained as it pertains to relationships.
People are far too generous with the info they put out for the world to see. This isn't really a surprise to me, but I wasn't expecting it to be confirmed so readily. Took me five minutes to track down an ex-girlfriend, despite having no idea what her last name is, and learned more than I really needed to know.
Looking up old acquaintances actually is interesting. An old friend I used to work with, who was the absolute cheatinest person I've ever known, is happily married to the same woman twenty years later and raising cute kids off in the Styx. Sometimes it really does take people into their thirties to grow up.
The combination of the above two should be self-limiting, but it's not. It's fun to look up old friends, and I suspect the ex-girlfriend I referred to had probably looked for me once or twice, so everybody has to be aware of how they're reflected on Facebook. Yet they still open themselves up for all the world to see.
As pointed out and also no surprise, it does a pretty good job at tacking your every move. Every page I went to had my little Oriental dude avatar at the bottom. However, this is the easiest thing to get around. I always keep a separate, private browser window open and when it's running inside of that one my regular browsing is disconnected. Aside from ditching the shit altogether, that's the one recommendation I'd make to everybody. Keep the functionality but lose the creepiness by running it in a private browser window. I've taken to using that for my Amazon shopping, as well.
The security is surprisingly bad. My ham-handed fumbling around to create my anonymous, mononymous account should have been quashed quite a few times. I suspect even this forum would have prevented me from doing what I did with Facebook.
Didn't realize it at first, as I was only looking for some added privacy, but having a mononumous facebook account looks pretentious as all fuck.
Suffice it to say, the grand experiment will be coming to an end pretty soon.