Who whatting how with huh?

You know what I think is one of the weirdest things about social media?  Like, weirder than people listing items of food or drink that they are about to consume, and weirder than people going to elaborate lengths to make their relationships "look" "happy"?  Women who try to outdo themselves when commenting on pictures of other women.

If you have any social media account that allows for pictures to be posted and commented upon, you know what I'm talking about.

1.  Girl posts [overly flattering] photo.

2.  Friend One indicates approval by liking or favoriting.

3.  Friend Two comments, "Nice picture!"

4.  Friend Three comments, "So pretty."

5.  Friend Four comments, "Beautiful."

6.  Friend Five takes it up a notch:  "You are the perfect person."

7.  Friend Six makes things weird: "You are a goddess on earth."

8.  Friend Seven:  "I am obsessed with you, to the point where I think about no one else."

9.  Friend Eight:  "I would have a sex change tomorrow if it meant you might date me."

10.  Friend Nine:  "I HATE MYSELF JUST LOOKING AT YOU BECAUSE I AM NOTHING IN COMPARISON. FUCK YOU."

11.  And Friend Ten, who is that person who never reads previous comments: "Did you cut your hair?"

Lather, rinse, repeat.

What is this?  I mean, aside from an empowerment/hear-me-roar exercise gone seriously uncomfortable?

Ladies, let's all just calm the eff down.  We are all beautiful, wonderful people in our own way (well, most of us), and we can express that to each other without getting creepy about it.

After all, that's what dudes' comments are for.

Facebook gets its feelings hurt, fills my inbox with sad love notes

When I flitted out of town at the end of last week for a work trip, I didn't consciously make the decision to not log into Facebook while I was gone, but...I didn't log into Facebook while I was gone.

I pride myself in not keeping up with what goes on in the Facebook world, to the extent that I frequently write about it on this blog in a slightly superior and annoyingly repetitive way. But in the interest of cutting the bullshit, I'm the nosiest person I know, and quitting Facebook cold turkey is not a reasonable thing to ask of myself...

...so I log in every day. I often immediately log back out without reading anything (typing that out loud makes it sound even more pathetic than it is, and I thought it was pretty pathetic to begin with), but Facebook seems to care less about my scrolling habits than it does about my logins. It's a quantity over quality relationship we've got.

And it turned out Facebook missed me. After three days, I began getting multiple emails a day in a transparent attempt to entice me to see what I was missing ("missing"). Intrigued by the increasingly desperate attempts to woo me back, I continued to not log in once I was home, just to see what would happen.

Here is a list of the emails I got from Facebook in four days:

Day Three Without Logging In
First email - 12:32 p.m.
Subject line: Becky, you have notifications pending

Second email - 10:27 p.m.
Subject line: Maggie [last name] updated her status.

Day Four
Third email - 6:09 a.m.
Subject line: Maggie [last name] updated her status: "If you defend Josh Duggar today or try..."

Fourth email - 1:33 p.m.
Subject line: Do you know Charlene Yeung, Kate Stokes and 8 others?  
[Answer: No.]

Fifth email - 10:10 p.m.
Subject line: Keshia [last name] updated her status.

Day Five
Sixth email - 5:02 a.m.
Subject line: Becky, you have notifications pending

Seventh email - 12:51 p.m.
Subject line: Keshia [last name] added a new photo to the album Mobile Uploads.

Eighth email - 10:47 p.m.
Subject line: Dorothy [last name] updated her status: "True love: giving the last egg and..."

Day Six
Ninth email - 6:23 a.m.
Subject line: Maggie [last name] updated her status

But then the experiment stopped because...

Tenth email - 6:57 a.m.
Subject line: Lee [last name] shared a link on your timeline.

At this point, curiosity took over and I had to see what Lee posted, so I logged in.

Nine emails.  NINE EMAILS.

Not only that, but nine emails that were staggeringly unappealing in their content. (I originally wrote out descriptions of the body of each email, but then I thought no, it was bad enough for me to read through them, why would I put anyone else through that?)

Again, it is a quantity over quality relationship we've got.

The ironic thing is that getting that many emails did something that no amount of willpower or moral righteousness has been able to: it got me to stop logging in all together.

I sense a longer experiment with this in my future...

More living. Less image-crafting.

I don’t often reference the specifics of my personal life, but last night, my friend Molly gave a very inspiring and thought-provoking speech at a Christmas dinner for her church.

Molly I have known each other for a while, through the running community, but it wasn’t until this past spring, when she and I realized that we shared a common interest in the impact of social media on both our individual lives and on our generation as a whole, that she and I truly became friends. We met for the first time outside of Breakaway at the Slider Inn on a Wednesday night – dinner and beer and exclamations of insight as we talked our way through the psychology of online sharing. Many, many Wednesdays followed.

Over time, our topics of conversation expanded, and as they did, Molly cut herself off from Facebook while I…well, I did what I always do…I stayed away until there was someone on Facebook I wanted to know more about, and then I slipped into a coma of thoughtless logging in “just to check.” I went back to my old routine of trying to figure out patterns of behavior based on friend placement, and I experienced the utterly superficial and (determined by my own expertise!) unfounded emotional swings that came with each movement in the rankings.

In other words, I fell off the wagon, and what started as a harmless exercise in research turned into a soul-deadening cycle of scrolling through my newsfeed at least once a day, which I swear wasn’t what I logged in to do, but now that I was here I might as well, and oh God, look at those comments and those "like" numbers, holy hell, fifty-seven "likes" for a picture of a dinner someone cooked for her husband?  (Where's my affirmation for the dinner I had to cook for myself?)

Part of what Molly talked about last night was the danger of comparison – how her own relentless checking in on what her friends were up to led her to lose perspective on the wonderful and full life that she leads. As she was speaking, I gently chastised myself for falling back into a trap I’d fallen into so many times before, but I also praised myself for being slightly above it all. After all, I’d long ago stopped bestowing “likes” on anything other than outstanding and truly noteworthy Facebook posts (I give out maybe two "likes" a month…if that). I respond to comments on my own wall, but never comment on others’ posts, and never go the Facebook route to reach out to someone if I can instead call, text, e-mail, or meet in person.

So yes, I may have allowed myself to be more sucked in than I wanted, but it wasn't out of control. If I started going through my newsfeed and felt a creeping nausea, I stopped and logged out. If I found myself logging in for no other reason than boredom, I stood up and walked away from my computer for a while (even at work!).

And then today, while on (wait for it…) Facebook, I clicked on a link posted by a friend (in using the word “friend” here, let me clarify that I went to college with her and I don't recall speaking to her during the four years we shared a campus together, but through the magic of the newsfeed algorithm, her life has been highlighted for me over and over, with her appearing more frequently in my feed than most of my closest friends [why is that?], such that I was a silent bystander through her entire courtship with her now-husband and am currently witnessing the final stages of her pregnancy – THIS IS SOMEONE I’VE NEVER SPOKEN TO) about the idiocy of all of us clicking “like.”  Why, the author argued, do we bother with “like,” except other people “like,” so we think we should “like,” and next thing you know, fifty-seven of us have wasted time congratulating a human adult person for the miraculous act of cooking a fucking meal.

Again, I felt the swell of self-righteousness. I am not like that, I thought. I rebel against the “like”!

As I kept reading, I ran across another link, this time to the Twitter feed of the guy who coined the term “humble brag.”  And so I opened that up in a new tab, expecting that my sense of superiority was going to blow the top of my head off (despite knowing, as I thought this, that this was not a good thing to think, because no one is superior to anyone else, and I genuinely don’t believe that…it’s just that I sometimes genuinely do believe that people should think more like me, natch), but as I continued to scroll down, I had this horrible realization, the cold, creeping sensation of self-discovery that only occurs when confronted with a truth about oneself so awful that there is no way to deny it:  I am a humble bragger.

Not on Facebook (Christ, at least I haven’t sunk that low), but here. On this blog. I do it all the damn time. Oh, look at me, I’m so sad that my name was mentioned during a podcast. Wait, what’s that? I have a quadrillion Google Plus views? Hey, check out this grainy picture of me that was sent to 10,000 Audubon members. No, for real, I don’t care about any of that…but while I’ve got your attention, let me talk to you again about how I published a book at 28, and ran three marathons in three years, and have a great job that I’m always really nebulous about but if you cared you could just look me up on LinkedIn (LinkedIn is the ultimate in humble brag platforms; the amount of shit that is spewed on LinkedIn…).

So, look at that, maybe not quite so "above it all" as I thought.

I probably do this because subconsciously I’m trying compensate for what I’m seeing elsewhere on the internet. I may not actively participate in the Facebook game of one-upmanship, but that doesn’t mean I’m not affected by it. I could even argue it’s a form of meta-humble braggedness to humble brag someplace other than Facebook (or Twitter). Like on this blog: look at me; I’m just over here on this website I created myself, where it’s all about me, and I’m sorry that you’re stuck having to log in and have other people log in before they can read about how awesome you are. (Suckers!)

And maybe it's even a form of humble bragging to sit here and expect you to read about how I had this really deep moment of introspection today and wow, look at how my first reaction was to share it with a bunch of people whom I mostly don't know. (While you're here, go ahead and check out the counter at the bottom - half a million and counting, baby!  #nothumblebrag)

But you know something else Molly touched on last night? Being kinder to ourselves. And it's entirely possible that the only reason anyone humble brags to begin with is that we're just looking for a little affirmation, and because we don't always get that from other people, sometimes we go overboard in trying to "prove" to ourselves that we're important. That our lives matter. That we're doing okay.

I started off this year with an entry that ended: "More living. Less image-crafting." I lost that somewhere along the way. I will aim to be more conscious of it moving forward.

But that's the beauty of real life, right? As opposed to the internet version? In the real world, life is always moving, always changing, and we're moving and changing along with it, which is how it is that the same person who wrote those words nearly a year ago is me right now, but also not me right now because that was a year ago and I already forgot.

I am okay (and not because of my blog views). And allow me to end this by turning the attention away from myself, and saying that I hope that no matter what I may (or may not) see about you on Facebook, all of you are okay as well.

:) 

BREAKING: Mark Zuckerberg Spends Exciting Saturday Night on Facebook

Screencapped this morning:

Publicly swearing allegiance to a bunch of Republicans has capped off an exciting week for Zuck, in which he also acquired a virtual reality company and (unrelated) promised to start beaming the internet from the sky.

Currently, I'm reading The Boy Kings, Katherine Losse's account of being a Facebook employee, starting near the beginning of the company's reign.  The jury's out on the book itself (I'm only halfway through) but there are some sharp observations scattered throughout:  "[I]n a little society we were constructing out of bits of code, it seemed that privacy - true intimacy - had become too scary," says page 72.

Interesting coincidence to read those words the same week Zuck buys a virtual reality company and makes a few political endorsements by impersonally clicking a "Like" button and letting an automated newsfeed broadcast it...

Facebook Turns Ten, Predictably Acts Like Most Annoying Ten-Year-Old Ever

Facebook, arguably the world's worst universally–used website created by a hoodie fetishist, has turned ten.  In celebration of this, Facebook is sharing a video on its login page of children having tenth birthday parties, all happy and scampering, running out into the ocean and whatnot.  It is a joyous, heartwarming tribute to a demographic that can’t join Facebook as they do the sorts of real-life things that no one is doing if they’re logged into Facebook.

Not to be outdone by his own login page, Mark Zuckerberg published a weepy tribute to his creation on his profile on Tuesday that, among other self-aggrandizing things, offered his explanation for Facebook’s success:  “[w]e just cared more.  […]  We just cared more about connecting the world than anyone else.  And we still do today.”

Yes.  Yes, I’m sure that while vomiting up code for the Winklevoss twins at Harvard, top of Zuck’s mind was how much he cared about connecting people.  Just like how I joined Facebook late in 2005 because all I could think about was making sure I had timely subject matter to write about on my blog eight years down the road.  (No.)

Zuckerberg created Facebook for the exact same reason I created a profile there:  it was something to do.  And look at us now!  All these years later...  One of us used that first step to cultivate a curiosity about the translation of real-world dynamics into online interconnectivity, and the other of us is the inventor of Facebook.

There are some very real and very serious topics I'd like to talk about regarding what's happened in the past decade, but somebody else already wrote everything I wanted to say and then some.*  As such, I highly recommend reading the article, even if some of what's contained therein is deeply disturbing.  No, I'm not talking about the revelation that all of those highly incriminating private messages I've sent over the years may not be private after all...

...I'm talking about the writer's absolutely awful conclusion that I am the quintessential Facebook user.  Me!  I never even post anything anymore, and yet the way I use Facebook is now the way most people use Facebook! 

Discovering that I am "completely normal" and "not special at all" (wtf) is the most terrible thing to come from Facebook yet.

But I guess if there's any consolation to come from all of this it's that at least Facebook cares.  Not only that, it cares more than anybody else.

Well, except for the 2004 version of Mark Zuckerberg, of course.  As his current-day counterpart has been sure to remind us this week, that guy cared so much he did what no one else would:  he gave to the world The Facebook.

***

ALRIGHT, in fairness to Facebook, the personalized "look back" videos we all got were pretty fun...

These videos were compiled using only things that users shared personally, meaning my video shows a very different side of "me" than my Facebook profile.  In the past few years, I (and lots of other people apparently - see link above) have essentially stopped posting, meaning all of the pictures of me and content on my walls now come from other people.  Perhaps not surprisingly, the portrait I paint of myself (above) is different than the one painted by my friends (my Timeline).  Interesting...

* Thank you for the link, Jamie!

Yes, Yes, We're All Very Happy that You Had a Great New Year's Eve...

Social media, originally conceived as liberation from having to speak to other humans in person, has, in recent years, done what all things do when things become popular/ubiquitous:  it has turned into something that reminds us that human beings are ridiculous.

I logged into Facebook a little while ago (seldom a good idea) and as I was scrolling through a billion and a half pictures of people (most of whom I only sort of know) looking super-popular last night, and through a couple dozen status updates about how wonderful life was in 2013 and/or how many wonderful things await in 2014, I was struck by a single, comprehensive thought:  all of you are full of shit. 

The game nowadays is to create an online image* - a digital replica of your life, with the one important caveat that it must not be your actual life because most of your actual life is pretty dull.  You sleep through a third of it.  You spend a lot of time doing things that are routine and unremarkable (no matter how hard any of you try to convince me otherwise, I will never find pictures of meals you are about to eat to be interesting).  And if you think about it, most of the other stuff, the "big stuff," like jobs and marriages and babies, are all so extraordinarily common that really it's a wonder anyone on the outside bothers to care in the first place.  (Congratulations on being alive.)

Our online selves become caricatures...personal cheerleaders on overdrive, represented by flattering pictures and valued based on friend counts and "Like" numbers.

Who are all of us trying so hard to impress, anyway?

I don't know too many people who had a good 2013.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that for a distressing percentage of the people in my social circle, it was one of worst years, if not the worst year, of their lives so far.  I watched a lot of people that I care about struggle, and I learned how lucky I am through the support I received during my own struggles.

What I propose - for all of you and also for me - is that 2014 will be better.  It will be better because I'm saying it will be, and Wayne Dyer knew what he was talking about when he said, "When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change."

But in this extroverted society that we live in, there is constant cultural pressure to share what's "better" with your peers - with me, for instance, via your Facebook profile - as a marker of your personal success.

And I want to call bullshit on that.  Personal success isn't measured in social media posts, followed by strings of misspelled congratulatory comments.  It's measured in your actual life, the one that's mundane and sleep-filled (and sometimes involves end-of-the-year posts that were written a day late).  Maybe I'm not impressed by euphoric pictures of a night out because I have nights out all the time and I can guarantee you that the existence of photographic evidence has no bearing whatsoever on the integrity or wellbeing of the people in the pictures.  And rarely, if ever, is a posed photo representing anything natural.

I just sometimes think that we're doing ourselves such a disservice to buy into this one-upmanship that comes with having lives that are increasingly searchable.  We're far more alike than we are different, and in the game of life, the only person you're ever really racing is yourself.  As I look ahead to this fresh, new year, I'm trying to be conscientious of that.  More living.  Less image-crafting.
 
Happy New Year, friends. :) 

*Guilty as charged.

Nine Friends on Facebook Timeline: HOLY CHANGE-UP, BATMAN! (New Algorithm, As of November 2013)

WELCOME to the fourth installment (one, two, three) of The B Channel's comprehensive coverage of Facebook friend rankings, a thrilling and exciting topic if ever there was one.  Our post today will cover what the bleeding hell happened to our nine last week.   

"The nine," for the uninitiated, is the box of nine friends on the Timeline portion of one's Facebook profile.  These nine friends are different for every viewer.  When your friends look at your Timeline, the nine they see is a mixture of mutual friends, randoms, and people on your friends list whom Facebook has determined may be of interest to them based on their viewing habits (interestingly, they will never, ever see themselves there).  The nine that you see when you look at your Timeline used to be a combination of family members, close friends, and people with whom you frequently interacted. 

LAST TIME in this exciting series, we discussed stalking habits...and more specifically, whether those stalking habits are discoverable by the stalkee.  Though the answer to that question initially appeared to be "no," extensive (some may say compulsive) experimenting by many, many readers proved at least a little bit otherwise.  Stalkers did occasionally show up in one's nine, but only if there was some prior history of communication, usually private messaging, between the two people.  However, once in the nine, if communication did not resume, the stalker would drop off very quickly.

Yes, we had it figured out, it all made sense, all was right with the world...

...UNTIL LAST WEEK.

That's when everything changed.

***

Here is my old nine, according to the last screenshot I took before the switch (about two weeks prior):

This ranking was orderly to the point of boring, based almost entirely on how many messages I exchanged with people (I exchanged the most with Number 1, second most with Number 2, etc.) with the leftover spaces being filled by people I have listed on my profile as family members.

Then, all the sudden, bam, NEW NINE, and only TWO of these people were carried over (Number 5, who was previously Number 1, and Number 9, who was previously Number 3):

Alright, let's stick new numbers on this baby and get down to bizniss:

Number 1:  Just posted a picture of me on Facebook.  We also get tagged at many of the same events, though that could be said for me and half the people on my friends list (because I socialize almost exclusively with a bunch of co-dependent runners whose love of physical activity only slightly edges out their love of documenting their every damned move on Facebook).

Number 2:  A long-term good friend, on whom I frequently bestow "likes."

Number 3:  My best friend.

Number 4:  A friend who messages me every once in a while.  Mostly, I ignore him.  (If you saw the stuff he sends me, you'd ignore him, too.)

Number 5:  The friend I currently communicate the most with on Facebook.  Moby Dick-length messages happen between us

Number 6:  A friend who posted a few pictures of me earlier in the fall, but nothing recently.

Number 7:  Another friend who messages me every once in a while.

Number 8:  A friend who posted a picture of me three weeks ago. 

Number 9:  A friend who has tagged me and messaged me fairly steadily over the past few months. 

***

ALRIGHT.  We seem to have...

1.  A increased importance placed on photos and tags.

2.  A gentle nudging on Facebook's behalf to remind me of people whom I interact with sporadically but not regularly.

3.  People I have had relatively recent interactions with now being given priority over family members (I don't have anyone listed as a "close friend," so I'm not sure if that has been affected or not).

***

As when the nine first debuted, I watched the order carefully over the first week and noticed several subtle changes, but nothing major.  No one left or entered.  No one made a huge leap either up or down the list.

But as with my first discussion of the topic of Facebook friend rankings, which back then was best represented by the six friends at the top of one's profile, there was one friend in particular whose movements were of more interest to me than anyone else's.  That would be Number 3, who stayed third for a couple of days before moving up to the second slot temporarily:

Why was this of such interest to me?  Number 3, as mentioned above, is my best friend, Kara.  But Kara, as mentioned in the original post, is, um, dead.  Has been for three years now.  So why the hell did she bump up in my rankings?  I called her presence in my six "The Kara Paradox," and I'm going to reinstate that term for this new situation in the nine.

Perhaps even more strange than the fact that she moved up is the fact that she's on there at all.  I do occasionally visit her profile, but certainly no more (and almost assuredly much, much less) than other people's.  So why is she there?

I don't know.  And I really don't think anyone is stalking me these days because I never, ever post anything on Facebook (like, ever), so maybe what I'm seeing isn't what you all are seeing anyway.

I'm eager to hear what, if any theories, the rest of you have about this new system of ranking!  I'M ALL EARS.  (Or eyes, since this in the internet.)  Inquiring minds want to know.

Among Other Things, Facebook Now Thinks I'm Black

Below is a list of actual recommended "Likes," provided to me by the fine folks at Facebook (Incorporated-dot-com-hashtag-Heil-Zuckerberg-comma-Marcus):

"being black"

Slim Jim Beef Jerky

the Seven Dwarfs (individually)
 

Demetri Martin (okay, truth be told, I love this man)

Buffy Summers (I love her, too)

an animated horse named Buttercup (?)

Six Flags

Mufasa

Silly Bandz

Jack Link's Beef Jerky (stop with the beef jerky)

Jennifer Lawrence

Fred
 

CBS This Morning
 

Air Wick

Encino Man

Fleetwood Mac

ABC 20/20

Blazing Saddles

Piglet

Chappelle's Show

Triscuits

Ziploc

Destiny's Child

Gone with the Wind

Mike's Hard Lemonade

To which I say...does The Bookface know me OR WHAT?!

("Or what."  There is so much fucking "or what" in that Ziploc recommendation.) 

Nine Friends on Timeline: Stalkers, Crushes, and Where Those Nine Come From

11/12/2013 UPDATE:  NEW POST!  The algorithm has changed, as of November 2013.  The most recent theories can now be found HERE. 

Well, well, it's been quite a discussion over on the first post covering this topic - so much so that I thought, for ease of information access, it was time to summarize our observations and theories regarding Facebook's nine friends box on the new, updated Timeline.

What we know for sure right now:  

1.  The only reason anyone is interested in this subject is because they want to know if their crush is stalking them.  (No judgment here; that is precisely the reason I became interested in Facebook friend selection long ago.)

2.  Sorry, you can't tell if your crush is stalking you.

(I know, I know, we've had a few anomalous reports that suggest otherwise, but I'm going to walk us through it and discuss confirmation bias along the way.)

One thing that cannot be denied is that the algorithm that Facebook uses to determine the nine profiles that show up on a person's Timeline is complicated, enough so that there is no clear-cut, across-the-board, definitive methodology to determining who will show up on your list and who won't.

But there are a few things that are unquestionably influential.

- People listed as "close friends" will get priority ranking.  Conversely, people listed as "acquaintances" will not show up in your nine.

- People listed as "family members" will also be prioritized, though how, exactly, these people are filtered in and out remains a mystery.

- For everyone else in your nine, your interactions are the primary (though we can't conclusively say sole) determinant of positioning.

And perhaps most importantly of all...

- Facebook has a memory.

***

I will fall on the sword of dignity here and offer my own case as an example.  A couple of years ago, I became friends with a guy I had a crush on and I stalked him.  Hard.  I went through every damn picture on that poor boy's page.  Hell, I'd be surprised if he didn't feel physically violated by the things I did to his profile.

Then one day (this was the pre-Timeline era, by the way), I was luxuriously relaxing my way through a nice morning of stalking when I noticed my picture on the side of his profile; I was one of the twenty friends that rotated with each refresh over on the left of his page.  Hmmm, I thought, that's interesting.  The next day, out of curiosity, I checked again, and lo and behold, I was still there.  And then again the next day.  And on the fourth day, OH MY GOD, I WAS THERE BECAUSE I WAS STALKING HIM AND FACEBOOK KNEW IT AND HE PROBABLY DID, TOO.

After coming close to dying of embarrassment, and then quickly recovering because I realized I didn't care (I have no shame), I started researching the subject, and made note that he was in my twenty as often as I was in his.  Was this because he was stalking me, too?  Or was my activity alone responsible?  I never got a chance to dig very deep because Timeline happened.  And then he started dating someone else.  And then I stopped stalking him.

But he never left my profile.  He stayed right there in my Top 25 (see this entry).  For months.

Much as my ego would like to think that he was secretly Facebook-pining for me despite being happily ensconced in his new relationship, I theorized that it was far, far more likely that he stayed in my Top 25 because I had done such a bang-up job indicating my interest in him to Facebook on the front end that it was going to be a very long time before anyone caught up to him.

I use this example because it mirrors what many of you have reported back to me:  people that you used to stalk have been sticking around in unusually high places in your friends rankings even after months - in some cases close to a year - of non-activity on your part.  You've also been experimenting with stalking and/or messaging/commenting with people you never interact with to see if you can get them to show up in your nine, and for the most part, those people do eventually make an appearance, but they're often low on the list and usually quickly replaced.

Zuckerberg never forgets.

What does this mean?  It seems to mean that Facebook is basing its rankings on a very long time scale of your activity.

And your activity can be hard for you to be an impartial judge of, which is where confirmation bias comes into play.  You may think you're keeping your hands clean, but every move you make on Facebook is tracked.  It's not just writing on a person's wall or sending them a message.  Every time you click on a picture in your newsfeed, that counts as an “interaction.”  So does clicking on a posted link. And hovering your cursor over their name in the mini-feed. And yes, visiting their profile. All of that counts.

I say this because, from personal experience, it can be tempting to think you're seeing something that must be the result of someone else's behavior when, in reality, what you may actually be seeing is the result of a click (or two, or twelve) that you forgot about...

***

We have had at least one example of someone (via a planned experiment) moving up in someone's nine after a single profile view after a period of inactivity.  However, this person was already in the nine...

We have also had confirmation of someone admitting to stalking someone but being nowhere near her nine.  (Also, I know of people who stalk me [they often give themselves away by creepily referencing things to me in person that are deeply buried in my profile] and none of them have touched my nine.)

And what does that mean?  It seems to mean that mutual activity plays a role, but your activity matters much more than anyone else's. 

For those looking to dig a little deeper, there are other places to find rankings of your Facebook friends.  One is this bookmarklet (which, warning, only works for profiles with Graph Search), a somewhat sobering numerical representation of your Facebook activity.  (Interestingly, people you aren't friends with, but whose profiles you visit, are ranked alongside your friends.)

And then there is the PiliApp ranking, which may (or may not) be the same as your chat list.

Both appear to be independent of the nine.

IN CONCLUSION, the nine friends on your Facebook Timeline are your close friends, your family members, the people you interact with the most, and the people you stalk (or at least used to).  And the major common denominator is that it's you driving these classifications. 

Please feel free to refute me if you have conflicting evidence!  I hope the conversation continues...in fact, complicated as it all appears to be on the surface, if this is really something that I can sum up in a single blog entry then I'm going to be a little disappointed...

Becky (Finally) Responds to the Terrible Facebook Home Video

I watched the promo for Facebook Home.  And then I decided the script needed a rewrite.


We carry our phones wherever we go.

They're with us almost every second of the day.

We reach for them when our brains want a kick of dopamine, or because we're too lazy to use our own memories to store information.

More than anything, we use our phones to disconnect from our immediate surroundings and to distract us from the people who are physically with us.

This is Facebook Home.

From the moment you turn on your phone, you cannot escape the nightmare of never being rid of your friends' incessant and insipid Facebook updates.

Your latest messages, calls, and updates are unavoidable, which will hinder your productivity and result in endless stress and anxiety as you attempt to respond to them all.

And you can keep chatting from any app, so no matter what you're doing, you will never be able to escape the weight of everyone you have ever met having instant access to you.

Home.

The same old experience for your phone.  Except worse.

(For Android only; fuck you, Apple.)

(Seriously, I can't believe they actually used a woman checking her phone in the middle of the night to try to sell this.  I guess this is the type of thing we're going to get now that Zuck is a Republican.)

The Nine Friends on Facebook Timeline (Or the Sad Tale of How Zuckerberg Ruined Facebook)

11/12/2013 UPDATE:  The algorithm has changed, as of November 2013.  The most recent theories can now be found HERE. 

Remember the good old days, when life was super swell, and everyone was happy all the time, and the world itself was so nauseated by the collective awesomeness of humanity that it vomited up rainbows and sunshine each morning?

If you answered yes, then you are either a delusional old white man in a position of power in the Republican party OR you remember a time before Facebook ruined Timeline by taking away the six friends box at the top.  We here at the B Channel have already lamented the loss of the six friends box in a previous post, but that does not mean we have to stop being bitter about it.

For the uninitiated, the box of six friends at the top of one's Facebook profile has, for as long as Timeline has been in existence, been the subject of rampant speculation and discussion, the main focus being on whether it is possible to discern if someone is stalking you (or vice versa).  With the new Timeline overhaul, the dynamic six friends box has disappeared - along with its slightly less interesting eight-friends-box cousin - and been replaced with a static nine box configuration which is basically the dumbest thing ever.

Please allow me to walk you through the last week of my life through the eyes of the new NINE FRIENDS BOX. 

Sometime over Easter weekend, my Timeline switched over.  My original nine were arranged thusly:

Number 1 made sense; I have exchanged more private messages with this person than anyone else recently on Facebook.  (Although no "public" interaction - likes, comments, etc. - which suggests messages are weighted heavily.) 

Number 2 is one of my closest friends; we interact accordingly. 

Number 3, see above.

Number 4 is my brother.

Number 5 is another family member that I interact with frequently.

Number 6 is yet another close friend.  She rivals Numbers 2 and 3 when it comes to interaction with me.

Numbers 7, 8, and 9 are all family members I very rarely (if ever) interact with in any capacity, although all three seemed to get "stuck" in my Top 25 (as discussed in the comments of this extremely exciting entry), and all three are listed as family members on my profile.

So we have six that make sense and three that kind of don't make sense but also don't completely not make sense.  (If that makes sense.)  

One of the most annoying things about The Nine is that they don't rearrange when you refresh your profile.  On the one hand, this makes it seem as if their ranking is more meaningful than the previous six and eight boxes, which were subject to frequent and real-time change.

On the other hand, the static nature of The Nine seems to, by default, remove all of the mystery.  No one has (yet) showed up briefly and disappeared, no one who wasn't already in my Top 25 has made an appearance, and though I've purposefully increased my interaction with a couple of people not in my Nine, while simultaneously stopping my interaction with a couple who are in my Nine, this has made no difference whatsoever in terms of who the Nine are.

Over the last week, I chronicled every single change in my Nine.  Here are the riveting results:

April 1 (one day after original order):

 April 3 (back to original order):

Later on April 3:

April 8:

The most interesting thing I can say about the changes is that both times Numbers 1 and 2 have switched, it's been on a Monday.  The first switch happened right after I sent a message to Number 1; forty-eight hours later, Number 1 was back to being number one.  Today (April 8) I sent a message to Number 2 right after she was bumped up, so I would imagine she'll remain in the top slot now for a while.

Do you see how boring this is?  How lame? 

WHAT IS THE POINT OF LOGGING INTO FACEBOOK ANYMORE.

There is none.  Checking my profile is now like looking into a dark, empty abyss of sad nothingness.  I mean for Christ's sake, if I wanted to look at unchanging rows of pictures of my friends, I'd pull out a damn yearbook.

This is no good, Zuck.  No.  Good.

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... :-/

Facebook Introduces "Graph Search," and Let's Talk About That.

[Before we get started...  "Graph Search"?  That was really the best idea that was floated their way in terms of naming this thing?  Graph Search?]

In case you haven’t heard (and it’s been hard to hear much of anything lately over the din of Lance Armstrong and Oprah Winfrey dominating the airwaves like it’s freaking 2006), Facebook has a new search feature.  It’s (regrettably) called “Graph Search.”

You, dear reader, are almost assuredly not among the tiny group of beta testers who have been selected to try this new tool.  You do, however, have the option of being put on a “waiting list” if you’d like to get access earlier than the general public.

Let’s set aside for a moment the fact that we, as a species, have now reached such a stage of technological saturation that we go on waiting lists for Facebook features (and every ounce of my disdain there I’m directing toward myself, because I signed up to be waitlisted yesterday like the lemming that I am), and move directly into an exploration of what this feature is, how Facebook is marketing it, and how the media is touting its potential.

WHAT IT IS

Graph Search is an expansion of the search feature that already exists on the site.  Currently, when you start to type into the search box at the top of the page, you are given a list of people, pages, and groups as Facebook attempts to anticipate who/what you’re searching for (much like Google’s “predictive” search feature).  The results are not alphabetical, but based on an algorithm derived primarily, though not exclusively, from whom you interact with or search for the most.  It’s a system that’s about par for the course when it comes to Facebook:  overly complicated and the subject of countless conspiracy theories.

Graph Search is set to change all that by offering results that are easier to scan (bigger pictures, more at-a-glance biographical information, etc.) and by allowing searches based on multiple parameters. Right now, the only time I use the search function is when I want to look up a specific friend or page. But Facebook is placing a bet that if I had the option, I’d do a different kind of search and I’d search more often.  Graph Search will allow me to search for things like “friends I went to high school with,” or “friends who like the Beatles,” or even “poorly-rated pizza establishments in Memphis,” pulling the results from the information my friends, and friends of friends, have already generously donated to Facebook via their “likes” and comments.

HOW FACEBOOK IS SELLING THIS

Zuck, through a flashy “unveil” page and video-with-gradually-crescendoing-music, wants me to think that this is an amazing new thing, this ability to search based on pretty much anything anyone's ever put on their profile, ever.  But Zuck has forgotten that I knew him long before he had a symbol on the New York Stock Exchange.

Back in the day, finding “friends I went to high school with” was as easy as clicking my graduation year on my profile.  In doing so, a list would appear with every person on Facebook who listed themselves as a graduate of Bartlett High School in the year 2000.  (Clicking the name of my high school, similarly, brought up a comprehensive list of everyone on Facebook who had gone, or was going to, Bartlett High.)

Zuckerberg.  We meet again...

Same with Beatles fans; prior to the onslaught of official “pages” (which brought with it the death of describing one’s interests in one’s own words), every “interest” that I listed in my profile was hyperlinked, and a simple click pulled up a list of anyone else on the site who had listed the same interest, with those I was friends with or who shared another similarity with me (like living in the same city) being ranked higher on the list than other complete strangers.

I realize that times have changed and there are now more sophisticated ways of organizing data than hyperlinking everything, but for the sake of argument, I can’t resist pointing out that hello, it was Facebook who took away the option of searching by category in the first place, so let’s not act like it’s some huge concession on their part to let us do it again.

And as for searches like “poorly-ranked pizza establishments in Memphis,” well, I was never going to search for that anyway.

And if I was, I’d just go to Google.

HOW THE MEDIA IS RUNNING WITH THIS

The same Google, that is, that the media is now telling me Facebook is in direct competition with.  Because of Graph Search, Facebook and Google are being billed as potential equals.

Okay…where do I even start with this…

a) Let’s not make the assumption that the bulk of my internet searches are reflective of a personal failing on my part to gather basic biographical data (that I’m apparently very curious about) from people face-to-face.  (Put another way, I never before searched for "friends who live in Memphis" not because Google couldn't answer that question, but because I would never search for that because I don't care.)

b) Also, let’s not assume that I trust my friends, or my friends’ friends, above all else as sources of information.  (OF COURSE I DON’T.  Not now, after I’ve seen all the dumb shit they post on Facebook…)

c) For every time that Graph Search will legitimately come in handy - in helping to find a good vet or in finding a deserving home for an extra concert ticket - every goddamn last one of us is going to waste days of our lives reading through the results of searches for things like “people who have written the word ‘fuck’ in a status update” or “friends who gave birth in their teenage years” or any other myriad of mind-numbing bullshit that we’ll come up with to search for.  Google is many things, but it has so far generally steered me away from getting too terribly personal with the lives of private citizens.

And yet, as is always the case, it's the bigger picture here that I am rebelling against more so than the specifics.  I don't have Graph Search (still waitlisted, it seems), but when I get it, I will probably secretly have some tiny amount of fun with it.  And that's my problem. 

When did it happen that "fun" became "sitting alone at a computer and sifting through other people's personal information"?  

Graph Search will likely be successful for Facebook (whose aim, after all, is simple and direct:  to get you to spend more time on Facebook).  But why is it that all of us are apparently leading such boring and empty lives that there was ever a market for this sort of thing to begin with?

Okay, is it just me...

...or all the sudden, is there a corporate ad at the very top of your Facebook feed every single time you log in?  I've logged in three or four times today, and every time, the top story was that one of my friends had "liked" some dumb company, followed by an ad for that company.  (Not my idea of a "top" story, Zuck.)

I find this so repulsive that it may inspire me to do what I've been trying to make myself do (with varying levels of success) for, like, the last year:  not log into Facebook so damn much.

Perhaps this is a good time to re-introduce you to my old friend.  He's been away for a while.  But I think he might be ready to come back to us. 

(I never gave up hope...never!!)


The new Myspace from Myspace on Vimeo.

Facebook Chair Video Hints Zuckerberg *May* Have Created the Universe

Facebook is like the ocean, because it is blue, and full of things that should never see the light of day.

Facebook is like a venereal disease, because you were just trying to make a connection, and now you've ruined your social life.

Facebook is like the floor, because it is the place all my vomit is directed toward when I watch this video:


One billion users today.  One billion users and the best they could come up with is, "Facebook is like a chair, and now it seats 1 billion asses."

Rumor has it MySpace is trying to make a comeback.  And God let's hope so.  Never forget MySpace Tom, who was a friend to all of us, and who wouldn't have been caught dead putting out a video like this.

Jesus.

I gave it the goodbye it deserved.

And that goodbye was one final clunky drive into Bartlett, blasting Blink-182 from the tape deck, avoiding the potholes on Bartlett Boulevard out of fear the entire rear suspension might give.

I took it home and I cleaned it up - top to bottom, inside and out - and along the way, found all sorts of memories.  A dried-up Strawberry Lip Smacker, circa 2003.  The directions to the hotel in Nashville where my college friends met up in 2006.  The Mad Libs that Kara gave me for my birthday in 2004 (that I never filled out; God love her, Kara thought Mad Libs were far funnier than I ever did).  A 2007 map of Illinois that had been rained on and was completely illegible...

And you know....try as I might, even I could not get choked up over a rained-on map and an old tube of lip balm.  Thank you, 1999 Dodge Neon with Sport Package and Rear Spoiler, for the ten years of loyal service you gave me, and especially thank you for not killing me that one time, because that would have sucked.

But you've been out of my life for all of 24 hours now and I barely even remember you anymore, so goodbye, MOVING ON.

I should find more reasons to post Fast and Furious stills.

(In comparison to the Neon, my new car - which I feel for security reasons I should maybe not describe in detail on the internet - is basically one nitrous oxide cannister and a Paul Walker cameo away from being in a mid-series Fast and Furious movie.  It's a fucking step up.)

Yay for adult decisions and surviving the (absolutely horrific) process of negotiating the price of buying a car!

IN OTHER NEWS, I will be gone all this week because I'm going to visit my brother in New York state.  I leave Tuesday, so there's your heads up as to why I'm absent from the internets (or group runs, should you be the type who is accustomed to seeing me in person).

IN THIRD NEWS, Zuckerberg got married over the weekend.  Way to fucking overshadow my car-buying experience, Zuck.  You couldn't just let me have my moment, could you?

This picture was pilfered from Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook profile.

I will never buy Facebook stock.

That's all the news from here for now.  'Till next time...

July 16, 2007

"Er, we have 'statuses' now on MySpace? I go away and this is what I come back to? MySpace stealing ideas from Facebook? What fucked up kind of crazy world is the internet becoming? I look forward to the day when Facebook is replaced by whatever inevitably-better social networking platform is going to replace it."

Nice one, Becky of 2007. 

Unfortunately, this post stands in stark contrast to my assertion in the previous entry that I am psychic.  I guess I will need a larger sample size before I determine whether or not I do, indeed, possess the ability to peer into the future.  (Although, in fairness, my premonition in the previous entry didn't come true either, so, er...)

Regarding the Six Friends at the Top of Your Timeline

11/12/2013 UPDATE:  If you are looking for information on the box of nine friends on the new Timeline, please see this post.

(I almost wrote this in the comments of the previous post and then thought, hell, I might as well just make this its own entry.)

There was an interesting little rumor going around the internet a while back that the twenty friends listed on the side of your (pre-Timeline) Facebook profile were the twenty people who had most recently looked at your page.

Facebook quickly asserted that this wasn't true, and that the friends listed were chosen via an algorithm that reflected which friends you most often interacted with.  This made sense to most people, although there seemed to be a public consensus that Facebook threw in a few randoms just for the hell of it, to throw everyone off.

And then Timeline happened, and things got a bit more complicated...

Zuck smirks at the thought of all the minutes I've wasted thinking about this.

Timeline replaced the list of twenty with three separate views of your friends:  a small box of six at the top, a larger box of six on the upper right of your wall, and a full non-alphabetized list that's available on a screen separate from your profile.  Though I have a few (hazy) thoughts on the latter two, we're only going to focus on those friends at the top today.

At first glance, it may seem as if these six friends are random.  If you refresh your page, you will get a different six.  But keep refreshing and you'll notice that some of the same people show up time and time again.  In fact, if you were to make a list, you would find that once you reached somewhere in the vicinity of twenty-five, you would no longer be seeing any new people.  (It may be twenty-four for you, or twenty-six, but generally, twenty-five seems to be the number.)

These twenty-five are (allegedly) your current "top friends" as ranked by Facebook.  This list can and does change (quite a bit) and what's interesting about it is that you are the only person who can see it.  When someone else goes to your profile, what they see in that box is mutual friends (and a truly random sampling of other friends, should you share fewer than six mutual friends).

So you have these twenty-five friends, and you're going through them and yeah, okay, there are some people on there that you stalk relentlessly, so it makes sense they show up, and sure enough there are some good friends whom you always leave comments or "likes" for, and then WHAT THE HALE.  There are also random people whose profiles you never look at, whom you never talk to, and whom you had forgotten existed, actually, until they showed up on this list.  What's up with THAT?

It's easy enough to assume that the wild cards are the people who stalk you (why else would they be showing up?).  But before you freak out thinking about all those people you, yourself, stalk who are going to realize what you're up to, let me explain why this theory is nowhere near soundproof.  I call it the Kara Paradox.

Kara, my BFF, has been on my top twenty-five list for as long as I've had Timeline.  I very, very rarely go to Kara's profile and Kara, who died sixteen months ago, obviously isn't looking at my profile, nor are we leaving each other comments or ever, in any way, interacting on Facebook...so why is she on my list?

Random refresh (with a few identities removed).

No, really.  Why the hell is Kara on my list?

Well, it turns out that you can manipulate your top friends list without realizing it.  If you've listed anyone under the "Close Friends" category, they will automatically be slotted into your top friends list.  Conversely, anyone whom you list as an "Acquaintance" will never show up on your top friends list.  I had listed Kara under my "Close Friends."

Mystery solved.

Or was it?

Interested to see what would changes it would elicit, I emptied out my "Close Friends" and "Acquaintances" lists.  And guess what happened to my list of twenty-five?

A hell of a lot less than you might think.  For one, Kara was still there.

And then there were the wild cards (i.e., people I don't interact with or stalk) on the list who claim to "never log in to Facebook."

And then there was the curious fact that the frequency with which certain friends showed up each time I refreshed changed depending on the time of day and the day of the week...leading me to believe that a person being currently online (even when not signed into chat) was having an effect on who was displayed.

In conclusion?  It's a lot more complicated than anything I'm able to figure out.  And while I do see some recognizable patterns in my friends list, I have to begrudgingly admit that what's being revealed isn't quite as informative as I originally thought.

Can you really tell who's stalking your profile?  Not with anything resembling certainty.  And for me - and I'm sure for a lot of you, too - that's somewhat reassuring.

Some Thoughts on Timeline

Don't have Facebook Timline yet?  You're not alone.  98.4% of my friends list doesn't have it, either.  It remains unclear when everyone will be making the shift, but before you change over, let me offer you my brief overview:

1.  Clearly this was Zuckerberg sitting around one day thinking, Facebook doesn't do enough to let you stalk people already.  Because oh-em-gee TIMELINE.  You can stalk the FUCK out of people with Timeline.

2.  The whole concept of having a cover photo at the top of your page is pretty cool...if you have any design sense whatsoever.  Which most people don't.  I think about people on my friends list who, like, can barely spell their own names and I can't even fathom them coming up with a classy jpeg that's exactly 851 pixels wide by 315 pixels high.  This can't end well...

Zuckerberg filled up his Timeline with some puppies and shit.

I, on the other hand, decided to make my Timeline look like MySpace.

3.  The friends list thing!  Dude!  It's so weird now!  With the "classic" profile look, you have twenty friends displayed in the sidebar and the list changes every twelve or twenty-four hours.  With Timeline, you have six friends at the top of your page and also a "randomized" friends list with all of your friends, both of which rearrange somewhat every time you refresh, but not enough for it actually to be random.

4.  How does Facebook choose who to display on your friends list?!  (That's the kind of shit I think about when I should be thinking about literally anything else on Earth because anything else would be more worthy of my time.  Timeline has made my curiosity worse.)  

5.  Timeline keeps throwing out awesome stories from my past and replacing them with less awesome stories.  I thought I had 2009 perfect.  I mean, totally golden.  Then BAM, the picture of me and Julia drinking in the kitchen during Senior Week was gone and a link to a bombastically weepy blog entry I wrote about Obama's inauguration was in its place.  What the hell?

6.  I barely remember writing that blog entry.  But Facebook remembers.  Nothing is safe with Timeline.  Nothing.  You just don't even know what crazy stuff from your past is going to randomly pop up and force you to stop and think about how simple your life used to be.  And remember, when everyone switches over, all of your friends will see all of this crap.

7.  Timeline creepily tabulates your friending activity.  238 people wrote on my wall in 2007.  I mean, what the fuck, who fucking cares?

8.  It also tells you how many people wrote on your wall for your birthday each year, which, I can already see, is going to be a one-way ticket to resentment and crippling insecurity.

Timeline handily makes your life look more interesting than it actually is by juxtaposing pictures with exciting links and wall posts on either side of an arbitrary divider.

9.  Timeline has a little box thingy at the top that shows your number of "Likes" and has a visual representation of your last two.  I really don't like to "Like" that many things because as soon as you "Like" something, you get all of that "Like"'s stupid updates in your newsfeed.  But until I "Like" something else, I'm stuck with Stephen Gyllenhaal's dumbass face staring at me every time I look at my profile since I "Liked" Cantara's book.  This is something I don't "Like" about how Timeline handles "Likes."

10.  Really and truly, out of all the things that Facebook has come up with, Timeline sucks the least horribly.  I only have five friends who have it right now, but of those five, I've spent the most time looking at...my own profile.  Because Timeline has reminded me that I lived other days before I lived this one, and that day was just as boringly normal as today is.  And apparently I find that fascinating.

Convincing you that you are in any way interesting:  it's the entire point of Facebook.  Which is why Timeline IS SUPER GREAT.  Or something.  The end.

Fascinating. And Creepy.

The night before last, Alex texted to ask about a picture of me.

"Which picture?" I asked.

"On FB," he said.

"But which one?"

"The one you just commented on."

When Facebook unveiled its new "instant feed" at the top of all of our home pages a couple of months back, there was much complaining and protest that this was an invasion of privacy.  Which, of course, it was.

I'm one of those people who is permanently "offline" on Facebook, but since the instant feed went live, there's no question as to when I am or am not online.  Every time I "like" a picture or post a comment or accept a friend request it's broadcast to my entire friends list.  And there is absolutely nothing I can do about it.

But as with all such Facebook changes, the protests died off quickly as people got used to having every move they made documented and announced...

...or was it maybe that we collectively decided that that was a price we were willing to pay as long as we were given the opportunity to spy on the online activity of other people in return?

What if we took it one step further?  What if there was a way to know not just what everyone's commented on, but who's been looking at your profile?  Would you be willing to trade that knowledge for revealing to other people those profiles you've been stalking?

We've all given up a lot of privacy for the privilege of watching other people's "likes" in real time, but personally, the thought of someone knowing I'd clicked over to their page for a quick read-through crosses a line.

About a month ago, I had what I thought was an epiphany about Facebook, and temporarily believed myself to be the bearer of useful stalking information.  But as I've observed my own activity and the activity of others over the past few weeks, I've realized that whatever I thought I was looking at has nothing on what's blatantly staring all of us in the face.

Strangely enough, the instant feed didn't bother me half as much when it was unveiled as it does now.  And that's not because of my own activity reports; it's because of the way I scroll through it and peep in on what everyone else is doing.  I'm uncomfortable with how fascinating I find it.

To be totally honest, I'm creeping myself out...