Miss Manners is not on Facebook. Which is probably good, because if she were, she would tell you to clean up your language and wear something besides caution tape to parties. But she would probably also have some useful things to say about the etiquette of a new realm of social interaction — some suggestions to make everyone’s life just a little bit smoother. In lieu of her wisdom, consider the following guidelines.

1. Poking: No.

2. Poking a stranger: NO.

3. Handle wall-posting with care. You never know who will be lurking — TA’s, old hookups — and you aren’t being as ambiguous as you think.

4. Keep your personal information to the point. A good rule of thumb is that you should be able to view the entire profile, from “Gender” to “About Me,” in one screen. If you have 30 novels listed, no one cares. If you quote 20 in-jokes, your friends already know them, and they’ll be incomprehensible to everyone else.

5. Don’t quote yourself under “Favorite Quotes.” After thousands of years of recorded human history, no one has said anything you like better than what comes out of your own mouth?

6. Do your stalkers a favor by accurately listing your relationship status. You don’t have to be all “I AM SINGLE AND DESPERATE” if you are, and anything ambiguous enough to be called “It’s Complicated” is probably a little too, well, complicated for Facebook. But if you’ve been dating someone for a year, save the lovelorn boy in your bio class a little bit of trouble and put “In a Relationship” on your profile. As to heterosexual people in relationships with their same-sex heterosexual friends: I don’t know what effect you’re going for (no matter what passes between us, you will never be as important to me as my best friend? I might not be in a relationship but don’t think I’m lonely?), but it’s just confusing.

7. On the other hand, there is no need to list what you are looking for. This is not OK Cupid, and as far as I know, listing “Whatever I Can Get” has never gotten anyone a Facebook message offering a rendezvous in Green’s West Wing. “Friendship” kind of goes without saying, unless you’re a hermit, and you wouldn’t have a Facebook account if you were.

8. Don’t put your privacy settings so that no one else can see your pictures, or you risk throwing us back to the dark ages in the beginning of Facebook when we only had one picture to judge someone’s attractiveness. If you don’t want potential employers to see your boozy pictures, de-tag them or adjust your privacy settings so that only your friends can see pictures.

9. Don’t put up albums composed exclusively of your glamour shots. Everyone has dark periods — sometimes known as junior year of high school, or last Wednesday afternoon when you were bored — when you pout, tilt your head just so, peer out from under your lashes and take a picture with your digital camera at arm’s length. But don’t bring the emo vanity shot to Facebook. Keep it on MySpace, where it belongs.

10. Don’t invite everyone you know to add your applications. Not everyone is interested in joining the pirate vs. ninja battle, and the kid from your 10th grade history class is not going to write in your Honesty Box.

11. And finally, the cardinal rule: Never, ever acknowledge to a stranger, in the real world, that you’ve already seen his or her Facebook profile. If you friended someone the summer before freshman year and drunkenly mention at a party that you “think we’re friends on Facebook,” that’s maybe acceptable. Maybe. But you don’t want to come across as “I know I don’t know you, but I’ve already memorized your list of favorite books and have decided that our children would be beautiful” — even if, after careful consideration, you know that they would. The fundamental idea is to use Facebook to foster social interaction, not inhibit it. And anyway, it’s more productive to casually slip his favorite books into the conversation like the sly weasel you are.