My response to your email and comments. Plus some facebook news updates.
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Monthly Archives: September 2006
Facebook, helping people get laid
So thanks to the new Feed feature, I saw that two of my friends joined a group called “If this group reaches 100,000 my girlfriend will have a threesome.” Wow. Brilliant. The description is:
So here’s the deal:
If I can make a facebook group with over 100,000 people in it before the end of the semester (Dec 31, 2006), I can have a threesome with my gf and a girl of my choosing.
The back story:
Like any red-blooded college guy, I’ve come to the conclusion that the idea of a threesome is perhaps one of the greatest things imaginable (right behind midget tossing).
Naturally, I have bugged my girlfriend, Holly, to partake in this dream of mine on multiple occassions… sadly, she has declined every single time.
The other day (September 4th, 2006 to be exact), she and I were talking about Facebook for some reason or another and she mentioned how she’s a member of some group called the “Largest group on Facebook” and she mentioned how hard it must’ve been to get a group that size together.
I promptly slapped her (jk darling)… and told her that anyone, given the proper idea, could make a facebook group of larger than normal size.
And just like that, the bet was formed. So INVITE everyone you know and help me on my quest for sexual salvation.
PLEASE HELP. My manhood thanks you in advance.
So I promptly joined. When I did some time this morning, it was over 76,000. I just checked again and it’s over 96,000. I refreshed like three minutes later and it had gone up several hundred more. It will break 100,000 by the end of the day, no doubt.
Someone created a YTMND for it as well.
This just shows you the power of social networks. I’m so impressed.
UPDATE 15:00: There are t-shirts.
UPDATE 15:05: It’s done. Over 100k and still going. I wonder if she’ll follow through with it. It was going at several hundred a minute at the end. I think everyone was refreshing constantly and facebook almost died.
UPDATE 9/10: If the group gets to 300,000 members, his gf will allow pics of the event. If it becomes the largest group on facebook, she’ll allow video.
UPDATE 9/12: The group is almost 400k now so pics will happen. You can vote on the third party for the threesome.
UPDATE 9/13: So the facebook group is gone. There is talk (don’t know if that link will work for people or not) of the whole thing being a scam by some record company that was just trying harvest email addresses or something along those lines. I will continue to investigate. Either way, genius.
The End of an Era
I think the time has come to retire from competitive disc golf. I wrote about my disc golf experience here, complete with highlight reel.
I haven’t played seriously or practiced in over a year and I only make the occasional tournament. This last weekend was the big championship in which the winner took home $2100. Not bad for a couple of days of throwing a frisbee. I figured I wouldn’t play well since I’ve averaged about one round a month for the summer.
I played in a couple tournaments earlier in the year and actually did really well. I won one (my first pro win) and played some of my best golf ever in the other. And that was without practicing. So I kinda held out some hope that I might squeak in last place cash or something this last weekend.
Nope.
I’m the kind of person that if I can’t be competitive then I just don’t want to do it. I still like to play and still want to play for fun but I know I don’t have the time or the drive to practice for tournaments. And I’m sure not going back down to the Amateur ranks. So I’m retiring from competitive play.
I’m not saying I’ll never play another tournament. I probably will but it will be with the mindset of “I’m here for fun and nothing else.” Heck, I hope to never miss a Tishomingo Ice Bowl with the Haydels in cabin #6. That’s too much fun and good food.
My time and energy for personal interests is going towards play rehearsal, improv rehearsal and silly bits for this website. Be looking for a play announcement in the near future, a plug for the Lab Rats and more videos on here.
Facebook > MySpace
I have a profile on both of these social networking sites. Facebook is only open to students/staff/faculty of high schools and universities. MySpace is open to anybody.
I do not understand the popularity of MySpace. It’s ugly. It’s hard to navigate. It sucks at cookie management (what? I have to log in again?). It’s hard to find someone. There’s no overall design flow going on. “Home” is confusing. There’s so many things to click on and they are scattered all over the place. What do they do? Where do they take me? Why are there so many places to click that take me to the same place? And I’ve never seen so many tables on one page.
I’m not a design guru or even really know what I’m talking about. But I know MySpace sucks. Being able to customize your profile is neat, but I sure can’t read it with black text over your busy background. That’s not really MySpace’s fault but I find I just don’t go looking at people’s profiles when they are painful to read.
MySpace comes out with “new” features. Basically meaning they just steal ideas from youtube and flickr and other sites. Do they make it a nice integrated feature? No, they shoehorn it in and make it clunky.
Then there’s the constant barrage of corporate ads and “friend” requests. Companies have featured content that I don’t care about and can’t really avoid. Not to mention all the scams from “HottJenny – check out my webcam” to “DebtsRUs.”
It’s annoying as hell but I’m on there because it’s a good way to re-connect with friends from years past. Did I mention it’s ugly?
On the other hand we have Facebook. It’s not open to everyone. You have to have an email address from one of the schools supported by Facebook.
It’s layout is clean. It’s not too cluttered (though it’s getter more so every week). Everything I want to do is right there in a nice neat side menu. Groups, Photos, Friends – all very well integrated with each other. When they come out with new features, it works so well with the current functionality.
When they added blogging (they call it Notes), you could either write it on their site OR import a blog. Thank You! A lot of my friends are on Facebook, I already have a blog, I don’t want to duplicate my work or maintain a new blog but I’d like for them to see my blogging efforts. Whenever I post this on my blog, it’s gonna show up on My Notes on Facebook. I like that. Of course, Friends and Photos are integrated into Notes and I can go in and “Tag” friends on one of my posts if I desire.
Facebook’s new feature, “Feeds,” has been met with some serious pushback. Your hompage now has a news item for everything that you or one of your friends has done on Facebook. It’s amazing. It’s also information overload.
Personally, I like it. I don’t have time to read every profile of every friend when they update and then wonder what they updated. I’d like to know what’s going on new in their life but it can be hard to see what that new thing is. Maybe they added a new band on their Music list that we both like and we could talk about it sometime, but it can be hard to wade through the entire profile trying to figure out what they updated. Now, I know exactly what they updated and I can read about it in one spot.
Some are crying Invasion of Privacy! I understand that. The new Feeds are a stalkers dream. But you know what? Everybody has a little bit of stalker in them and the information was already there, it’s just easier to find now. No one can see any more than they could before. The privacy options haven’t changed. Here’s Facebook’s initial response.
I think the Feeds idea is great, I like knowing what’s going on in my friends lives but it needs some tweaking. As far as I can tell there’s no good way to manage which of my actions will show up in others’ feeds. If I could say “I want others to only see when I’ve updated the About Me and my photos but not anything else” that would be cool. Also I’d like to manage my feed and say “I only want to know when others update their status.” Right now EVERY LITTLE THING is in the Feed. From Wall writings to status updates to photos to who’s in a relationship with whom. It’s very cool but some customization would be nice.
There’s also a “Mini-Feed” in everyone’s profile now. I could take it or leave it but it’s nice that you can click on the little triangle next to each section heading and expand or collapse it. So if I don’t want to see the Mini-Feed on everyone’s profile, I just collapse it.
Facebook doesn’t have the profile customization that MySpace has. To me that’s not a bad thing but I can see how people like that. Maybe Facebook can come up with something that allows people to make small changes that will allow one’s profile to reflect their personal style a little better. But I’m not keen on loading a profile and death metal comes blaring out of my speakers and my brower freezes up because of some cutesy Flash picture animation that’s half-baked and doesn’t work right.
I wish all my friends could get on Facebook and I could kick MySpace to the curb. Facebook ain’t perfect but I think its implementation of social networking is far far better than MySpace.