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I hate your face… book

Ben Pack, Arts and Entertainment Editor
Published: November 17, 2009

Facebook. You probably use it, your friends use it and maybe even your relatives use it. Facebook is the website that “helps you connect and share with the people in your life.” Yet, over the past year, there has been a little too much connecting and far too much sharing. If you have a Facebook account, you probably have taken issue with a few annoying user habbits.

Anyone who uses Facebook has more than likely been noticed a rising problem, specifically over the past few months. The problem is invites for those annoying little Facebook applications. You get the occasional “What irrelevant cartoon character are you?” and “What is your future spouse’s favorite popsicle flavor?” quizzes. These are usually easily dismissible, singular occurrences. The real problems come from “freeto- play” games.

FarmVille, Mafia Wars, Restaurant City, Fashion Wars and YoVille all have two things in common. There is no end to the actual game, so players keep playing and playing until they either somehow lose interest, or completely go insane. The player receives some kind of bonus if they invite all of the suckers, or as they call them “friends” they know.

Not really a game anymore, these have become more of a mini-pyramid scheme. You often find dozens of invites for these games if you don’t frequently delete them, and some friends claim to have literally hundreds of unaddressed invites. This can be a serious problem if there is something legitimate for them to see amongst the clutter.

Your suggestion box might not be the only thing cluttered. Another problem I frequently come across is managing my friends list. I personally have 124 friends on Facebook and while it’s not a lot in comparison to many people I know, it is a much greater number than people I frequently talk to on the site.

If I cut it down to just people I have talked to in the past year it would be a number closer to one quarter of my total number of friends. This might not be such a bad idea.

A quick scroll through my friends list and I realize that I haven’t talked to most these people since my high school graduation. Yet they still send me requests with no intentions of catching up with me, or any time in the future. For some reason I still accept them.

After asking a few friends they all said [aside from a few exceptions] that, they all accept friend requests on Facebook even if they have no intention of talking to person. I guess that denying friends is something more for higher profile people; like actors, or community college student newspaper arts and entertainment editors. This is often not a problem, until that “friend” of yours starts posting updates that are so useless that Twitter would even deny them.

We could just as easily delete them from our lists and odds are that unless they watch their friend count like a hawk they won’t notice that you are no longer their friend. But there’s just something about deleting people you know but don’t talk to on Facebook.

It’s almost like acknowledging that you will never see this person again, minus the occasional reunion. And who knows, someday they might be a multi-millionaire and you can mooch off them.

Like most things technological, Facebook is only as good as the users make it. So please, have a little consideration next time you log in.

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