“It is better to be anonymous and be thought to have a boring life than to start a Facebook page and erase all doubt.”
You may have heard of social networking Web sites like Facebook, MySpace, EgoTronic and PissyHissers, among others. You might be wondering what they’re all about. I’m not going to tell you. (Go ask your seven year-old daughter.) However, if you’re thinking about joining one (let’s say…Facebook), or have recently signed up, here are a few things you might want to keep in mind:
It’s embarrassing to have too few friends on Facebook.
It’s embarrassing to have too many friends on Facebook.
How much leeway somebody gives you on how many Facebook friends constitutes too many or too few varies depending upon how many Favourite Movies you have in common.
If your ex isn’t your friend, your ex shouldn’t be one of your friends.
The photos in your holiday album are really as boring as the photos in the holiday album of everybody else, but your 100,000 friends are too polite to tell you.
Saying, “I haven’t done anything remotely interesting today” is only funny the first 500 times other people hear it.
Saying “I haven’t done anything remotely interesting today” never grows old if you’re the one saying it. And, if you do it often enough, it becomes a meta-commentary on Facebook itself.
Don’t knock sympathy friends – sometimes, they’re the only ones who matter.
Don’t put anything on Facebook that you wouldn’t want your teachers to see. Or a potential employer. Or your mother. Especially not your mother.
Do not attempt to write a treatise on why Last Year at Marienbad is the greatest film ever made in your Favorite Movies space…unless you can be really, really, really, really, really concise.
The Favourite Television Shows space is not a good place to rant about the writers’ strike – that’s what www.damnwriterstohellforeternityespeciallytheonesonlost.org is for. Besides, by the time you actually write something of value on the subject, the writer’s strike will be over.
Nobody cares what your Favourite Music is.
You don’t have to join all the groups on Facebook.
In fact, you could spend the rest of your life just joining Facebook groups.
A good rule of thumb is: if you’re spending more time joining groups than participating in them, back away from the computer slowly and take a deep breath.
You don’t have to use all the third party software available for Facebook. Seriously.
Poking somebody can be amusing. Once. Biting them in the neck like a vampire is just rude, even if the only blood spilled is in pixels.
Facebook is not mocking you when it asks if you want to try to beat the score of somebody who has gotten a perfect score on a quiz. It’s a programming glitch.
You should seriously reconsider having a piece of third party software if it either uses your credit card to buy peripherals without your permission, starts a torrid romance with a bookkeeper in New Zealand without your knowledge or seems to be having more fun than you are.
The fastest per capita rate of growth on Facebook in 2007 was in Canada. Now, how hip do you feel?
Your Web comic depicting elves getting naked and having sex is only funny the first time; your continued high readership is for a different reason that you probably don’t want to think too hard about.
Video of your band thrashing in your parents’ garage might get more views if you played something more than Zeppelin covers. Seriously, dude, just stop.
Dissing people on MySpace is uncool. Unless they really deserve it.
Have social networking Web sites made us more self-obsessed, or do they allow us to express our self-obsession more honestly? If you actually ponder questions like this, you probably aren’t on one. If you write dissertations about questions like this, you’re definitely not on one.
How much time you spend on Facebook will depend upon your disposition and personal circumstances; however, if you have to check your friends’ pages to remind yourself of what they look like, you probably need to get out more.
If you’re going to list yourself as “single,” make sure that your partner is not on Facebook. As well as all of their family members. And all of their friends.
That is the power of networking.