Ah Facebook, let me tell you about Facebook.
I have over 600 friends on facebook. Why? Because I crave validation. Also, I apparently know too many people. But, mostly, I crave validation. I have over 600 friends! People must liiiiiiiike meeeeeeeeeeeee.
I love facebook, because it gives me the ability to see who got married, who get pregnant and who just got a puppy. It’s like societally approved stalking. And who wouldn’t want to know that their exes all got fat?
Personally, my exes all got not fat… but I choose to believe that the ones without accounts are all just hiding their shame.
I will leave the form of said shame as a creative writing exercise for my readers.
You know what I don’t like about facebook? The 7,362 application requests that I get a day. I’m irrationally amused by Super Poke and I like getting tagged in (flattering, they had better be flattering) photos but I don’t want to find out what 80’s movie character I am, I don’t want you to plaster bumper sticker slogans all over my facebook page and, even though I don’t wish any ill on the rainforest (in fact, I wish all the best for the rainforest) I don’t have any desire to click on L’iL Green Patch links 72 times a day.
There, I said it, I’m ignoring all of your L’il Green Patch requests.
Yes, we will all die of global warming and its all my fault.
My L’il Green Patch is probably being eaten by virtual birds as we speak.
Totally agree. The applications are WAY too invasive. But I do like knowing which Muppet I am, I’ll admit.
I hate those app invites. Last week I trimmed (and by trim i mean I took a large cleaver to) my friend’s list and it’s much nicer now. I went form 510+ people to about 152 of them. I finally had gotten tired of reading status updates that I didn’t care about, or worse, made me angry.
The criteria was pretty simple:
1) are we related? Gotta keep those people. I really don’t want to deal with that drama next time i go home…
2) If i were bored and you were nearby, would I call you to do something?
It made it pretty easy to do bulk deleting of those 350-some people on there.
And now when i look at updates, I actually care about them. It’s pretty sweet. Plus, now I don’t have random people at work ask me why my day is going so bad.
I tried to cull… I just can’t do it. I just can’t. I’ve got clients and people I went to summer camp with and kindergarten. I just threw my hands up. But I agree. I don’t give a hoot about being in your mob war, or having a virtual drink with you… frankly, if you want to have a drink with me, let’s go.
I do find a ton of value in the ancillary folks on my stupidly long list, especially those who are my colleagues. While I don’t always care about the best steak they’re making RIGHT THIS SECOND (and presume they don’t care when I put it on my page), I can get past that because I know they had a kid or lost 50lbs or had some other life moment that I wouldn’t know about otherwise… and that strengthens my relationships with them.
Oh, and PS Hope, you crack my shit up. 🙂