Sunday, January 31, 2010

Is it MyFace or SpaceBook?

About a year ago, during an incoherent moment, I joined one of those social networking groups. I think it's name was MyFace or SpaceBook or SpaceFace or MyBook or something. Anyway, I signed up because several people were pestering the hell out of me to do so. They were all acting like this was the answer to all of our social problems. So I signed up and created a profile.

What I discovered was Nirvana for losers. Let me put it this way, I retired when I was 51. So, basically, I have the rest of my life to do nothing. If I took all of that free time, it would not be enough to answer all of my friend requests, heart requests, puppy requests, frog requests, answer "this question" requests, etc. And I don't even work the site.

I thought it might be a cool way to keep up with with my friends activities or parties or something useful. What I found was a lot of specious requests to waste my time.

specious
adjective
specious reasoning: misleading, deceptive, false, fallacious, unsound, spurious, casuistic, sophistic.

Apparently I have a "wall" where new communications are posted. This is as opposed to some other area where my "friends" can, for lack of a better word, blather. I get to hear about work schedules, dogs, kids, diets, girlfriends, boyfriends, job interviews, polls on anything and everything (nothing interesting), and very little of any interest to normal people.

So I stayed active for about 30 seconds and forgot about it. Time went by. The seasons changed. Brett Favre came out of retirement, a bunch of other stuff happened and Kurt Warner retired. So, now I'm noodling around on my computer and I find a link to F-Space or FaceTube and I think, "Oh yeah. I haven't been on there for a while." So I click on the link. My computer dutifully remembered the user name and password and I was in. I looked around for several seconds and re-realized, "Oh yeah, losers." and signed out. Total time: 18 seconds.

Since then I have been inundated with friend requests and messages on my "wall".

So I'm trying to figure out if this is some kind of computer robotic activity trying to stimulate a false sense of community by matching everyone in my address book with everyone on SpaceFace or MyTube or whatever - OR, if everyone I know has been signed on and waiting for the last 11 months until I logged in again to post their friend requests? I mean, I occasionally see some of these people and they seem normal enough. (But, then again, I'm judging them by my standards.)

I may never know.

Because (as I understand it) the first rule of TubeFace is you don't TALK about Tubeface.

.