Social networking defense: Facebook alibi

Facebook is great at wasting your time. It could also keep you from doing time.

With more people revealing the details of their lives online, sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are providing evidence in legal battles.

The message on Rodney Bradford’s Facebook page, posted at 11:49 a.m. on Oct. 17, asked where his pancakes were. The words were typed from a computer in his father’s apartment in Harlem.

At the time, the sentence, written in street slang, was just another navel-gazing, cryptic Facebook status update — meaningless to anyone besides Mr. Bradford.

But when Mr. Bradford, 19, was arrested the next day as a suspect in a robbery at the Farragut Houses in Brooklyn, where he lives, the words took on greater importance. They became his alibi.

When the Facebook evidence was confirmed, the charges were dropped.

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