Facebook's "New" Timeline Is Zuck's Personal Attack on Me

It is no surprise to anyone who has read this blog or visited my Facebook profile or met me for five minutes in real life that I have some issues with Facebook.  So why, you may ask, do I write about it so much?

Well, for one, it is a pervasive part of modern life, and my own active dislike of it, combined with a systemic dependence on it for social planning, has resulted in a deeply-rooted personal conflict that I periodically need to write out in order to make sense of...

And two (more important), these Facebook posts are really fucking popular.  Generally speaking, they help my traffic over here even more (if you can believe it) than the entries about the Gyllenhaal boy that I roll out every now and again.  

Here is an actual graphic of my actual traffic on this blog:

I swear this is the right graph even if Google has put completely irrelevant dates under it.

The first peak, back in '11 ('09 on this poorly-labeled chart), was because a Bud Light can I used in my first Cheap Beer of the Month Club entry randomly wound up at the top of a Google image search.

But the steady rise you see in the past few months has been almost entirely because of a single entry, a post I called "Regarding the Six Friends at the Top of Your Timeline."  It was popular from day one, and has only gotten more so (see graph).  Recently, it's been pulling in about a thousand hits a week.

Mark Zuckerberg, well-known dork and personal foe of mine, seems to have taken note of the fact that interest in my blog entry has soared because when he rolled out the "new" Timeline over the weekend, there are no longer six friends at the top.  (!!)  (??)  (!?)

a) This has ruined my only real source of outside blog hits at the moment. :(
b) This has taken all the fun out of logging into Facebook, because usually when I log in, I get annoyed by, like, the seventh update in my newsfeed, so then I just click over to my profile, take note of the six people at the top, and come back here to discuss wild conspiracy theories with complete strangers.  (This was the best part of Facebook!)

On top of that, he changed up the cover photo so my painstakingly crafted masterpiece celebrating my individuality no longer fits correctly, and - and! - the Timeline itself now closely mimics the layout of the mobile version of Facebook.  So I'm really glad I spent all that time eighteen months ago highlighting stories and making sure everything looked great on a computer screen.  (Christ Almighty.)

Basically, I think it's undeniable at this point that all of these changes were directed at me, specfically, because how could they not be?  That's what Facebook is about after all:  ME ME ME.

I guess the best I can hope for at this point is that, deprived of the six-friends box to obsess over, the masses start searching in earnest for opinionated reviews of Graph Search.  Either that, or I'd better come up with a theory on that new nine-friends box pronto... :-/