My Friends. . .I Apologize to You All

I’m killing time waiting for the final presidential “debate” [it's a joint televised appearance, not a debate, but let's save that for another day]. So I decided to goof around with yet another interactivedigitaldemocracydoodad.

I can’t be sure, but I think I just gave up all my friends in order to learn that I, like Barack Obama, am intellectual, aesthetic, and curious.

This is one of those pointless quizzes that demands you rate yourself on a handful of questions between two false extremes, tallies your claims and disgorges a simpleton analysis. Honey, I shrunk the Myers-Briggs.

But in my haste to do this, I clicked “Allow” on the following screen:

I know that even creating a profile on a social network is the first step to losing any pretense of control over my identity. But I think I just allowed this stupid application to suck in all my friends’ info and “other content” it requires to do its work. Maybe I’ve done this before. I really don’t know.

But the combination of the inanity of the application combined with what appears to be a full unconditional grant of my friends’ goodies is deeply annoying.

I have 180 friends–okay, “friends”–on Facebook. I think it’s too late to do anything about it.

To my friends, I apologize. Unfriend me if you will.

Luckily, from the information above, it looks like that’s unlikely to happen. My friends, I now know, are “understanding.”

Dear Facebook: Bite Me

This ad on my Facebook page today:

Yes, Facebook, I’m 51. And yes, I’m overweight. *

But at least I have friends.

I wonder if you’ll be able to say that a year from now.

___________________________________________

* “overweight” only according to standardized Body Mass Index assessments, which are widely known to be highly inaccurate and often defamatory. I actually have really dense bones and an extraordinarily heavy head–it’s like a freakin’ anvil–so this targeting of me as an advertising prospect is unfair, wrong and possibly actionable.

GSP Liveblog: The Future of Facebook Commerce

Liveblog from Graphing Social Patterns East is boring even me. My sincere apologies for two dull entries just posted. New format: Three Points

Session: Facebook

1. By using attributes from profiles, marketers can target ads and applications to people by geography, interests, activity on network, etc. Use [Facbeook] people “like you do keywords” when buying Adwords keywords. [Note to self: Icky but fascinating.]

2. Application example: Open Table permits restaurant reservations across network rather than requiring people to visit their site to make reservations. Could be targeted geographically, by interest, by network activity, etc.

3. Another example: Someone “friends” a dentist and their friends see an ad for the same dentist. [Ickier than the rest, for some reason.]

My takeaway: People’s Facebook home pages will soon fill with [more] targeted commercial clutter [than there is currently]. What’s that I hear in the distance? Could it be a death knell?