Facebook, facebook, whither art thou?

I have a confession to make.

I’ve not-so-recently become addicted to Facebook.Yes, sadly I spend all my web time waiting for my next fix of Facebook updates. You know, things like “Brendon is movin’ on up in FarmVille!” or “Brendon attained the level of Lord of the Plow in FarmVille”. Everybody deserves to lord it over inanimate objects.

FarmVille

I’m also especially glad to know that “Kathleen loves all of her fish in FishWorld”. Because, you know, fish have feelings too.

Fishworld

And this is why I haven’t had much to say for myself – for who can possibly compete with the riveting social commentary and insightful statements that are now littering FB? Who would weighty words write when he himself might his quietus make with a Facebook app? And therein lies the problem …

Looking at the growth statistics of Facebook, over the last year it has gone from around 20 million users to over 300 million users – that is as many users as there are people in the USA. When it started, FB was simply a vehicle for students at schools and colleges to network with each other. To join FB, you had to be a student. Some marketing genius then decided that opening FB to the great unwashed hordes would be a wonderful idea. That way they could pay more in terms of server farm usage to garner a larger, unpaying, user base. Little did all of us FB users know that it was really all part of their cunning plan to achieve world domination. Or at least their plan to destroy the blogosphere.

And with that one idea – opening up FB to anyone – they basically struck pay dirt. Everyone and their grandmother decided to join FB and share the minutiae of their lives with almost complete strangers. For those that really thought FB wasn’t enough, they decided to get onto Twitter and tweet away all day.

Because everybody needs to share the contents of their last vapid thought with the entire world. But I digress …

So, in my abridged history of Facebook, everyone is at the point of just having discovered this spiffy new way of sharing their lives with your random suicidal bridge jumper and the kind, wonderful people at FB must have thought “hey, let’s do something to screw with the faintly interesting bits of information that people post about themselves as their FB status message. I know! Let’s create this concept of FB apps, and try to get an ecosystem of FB games together. Let’s make some all cutesy and folksy so we can sucker those religious nut jobs into playing them, and lets make some more dark and bloody so we can get all those stupid little goth brats involved in them too. And while we’re at it, we should make it a requirement that in order to advance in the game they have to make regular status updates like ‘Virginia has achieved the level of Assassin in Mafia Wars’”.

So now all we get to see in Facebook is either a series of updates from Vampire Wars, Mafia Wars, FarmVille, Fish World or some other inane game, or an equally nauseating set of updates from 30-somethings who’ve just discovered that having a little brat actually involves more work than anticipated and perhaps that puppy they briefly considered may have been a better option after all because the worst case with the puppy is that it will take about 9 years for it to die.

Which brings me back to my Facebook addiction. I now have some simple rules that I’m going to be applying:

I’m planning on using lite.facebook.com. Yup, that’s right – no apps. Yay! It is, however, rather crippled so I may occasionally use the full experience. I know I’ll pay for that with some emotional scarring, but it’s a risk I guess I’m willing to take. For the moment, that is.
If you keep putting shit on Facebook about how you’re so happy your little moron managed to not trip over his or her feet on the way to school, I’ll probably wind up either blocking you or unfriending you. The time for niceness is past.
If you work with me and send me a friend request, chances are high that I’m going to ignore it. No more Mr. Sociable.
I’ll probably be posting lots of pictures of cats doing cat-like things. And statements of pride in their ability to be cat-like.

And finally, I’m going to start browsing to other web sites again. Like BBC News.

And porn.