Facebook Talk

Call me crazy, but I’ve never been a huge fan of spam. There, I’ve said it. Slogging through spam is about as enjoyable as a root canal. In fact, a root canal is just a notch above sorting spam because at least with the dentist, there’s always the chance of pain killers being involved.

So with that said, imagine my surprise when I checked my Facebook wall tonight to find some lovely spam from a sleazy company known as Ring Rockstar.

I’ve messaged the friend who sent it to me and she assures me that she didn’t post the message. Thanks to her newsfeed, we’ve been able to see that her account only posted the message on my wall for some reason, but we’re not really sure why as neither of us have talked on Facebook in, well, forever. The spam seems 100% random and yet is still 100% annoying.

This is something that Facebook has in the past and needs to continue taking seriously. We can talk all we want about how Facebook is slowly turning into Myspace what with all the clutter on people’s profiles thanks to applications. Yet the day spam runs rampant on Facebook is the day it’s officially dead to millions of users. It’s the deal-breaker that keeps far more people off Myspace and on Facebook than some realize. I can’t tell you how many spam messages and comments I get on Myspace in a given day, but up until now, that number for Facebook was a resounding zero.

I certainly hope it continues to be that low for a long time to come, this one message aside.

Facebook, Myspace, spam

Want to win a smooth and quick $100? Then the SMUG $100 Facebook Hacker Challenge is just up your alley. Although if you’re such a good hacker, why aren’t you just breaking into people’s bank accounts and stealing way more than $100? Huh? HUH?

The premise behind this challenge is that some guy said that Facebook is secure enough for most businesses to discuss shop without having to worry about what they were saying being seen by outside people. Long story short, he decided to put some money on his beliefs and created a secret group on Facebook. Anybody who can gain access to it will win $100. If you can upload a picture to the group, then you’ll get $200.

Frankly, I think it’s just a great publicity event. Promise some money if people can do something you’re confident is impossible, let a ton of other sites write about it and link back to you, and sit back and relax. I can do the same thing though. I’ll give $1 million dollars to anybody who can figure out the number I’m thinking of between 1 and 78 gazillion. See, it’s that easy.

Now HERE is the kind of Facebook story that I like writing about!

Let’s say you’re a member of the press and you live somewhere in Europe. How about France, because we all know they have great wine and beautiful women. So you’re a member of the French press and your editor tells you something about this American website called Facebook and how you should do a story on it. You look around the site, see that there’s an application called ePresident, and that the recent global winner was a local Frenchman. Cool! That would be a nice little interview and read, seeing as how your own country just held President elections recently.

So you call up the winner, interview him, and during the process he jokes that now he is “President of Facebook,” he has access to every Facebook member’s profile and information, which is more than the entire French press combined. And you believe him and thus file it in your story. And then other news outlets pick up on your story and don’t bother to fact-check as well, and then more and more pundits and anchors and newscasters are talking about how powerful people on Facebook can become and before you know it, you have an entire country’s media thinking you’re more powerful than them. When all along a simple freaking Google search would show them that you’re simply messing with around with everybody!

Honestly, anybody who doesn’t love this story has no sense of humor.

Basically, what happened was a young man by the name of Arash Derambarsh “won” a contest held by ePresident and was crowned the Facebook President. In reality, he only garnered about 9,000+ votes, but that was enough to net him first place. Then he had his image and a little message posted on Facebook President and simply ran with the story that he was now the President of Facebook.

This story is all over the net now and is huge in France. I read about it on TechCrunch, but the guy already has his own Wikipedia page (I can’t read any of it though), and a Facebook group dedicated to pointing out to anybody who’ll listen that it’s a hoax. People, and particularly the news media, are just now starting to realize they’ve been duped. But honestly, they have nobody to blame but themselves. It’s not Arash’s fault nobody in his country decided to Google his story or make a few phone calls to make sure he was telling the truth.

Um, in fact, I’m the King of England folks! If anybody needs a comment from me, I’ll be busy sitting on my throne and rebuilding my empire.

France, Facebook, hoax, Arash Derambarsh, President

A young girl in Toronto, named Stefanie Rengel, was brutally stabbed by two fellow teens on New Years Day for reasons that are yet unknown. In Canada, there’s something called the Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA), which prohibits the publication of information by newspapers, radio, TV, etc “… if it would identify the child or young person as having been a victim of, or as having appeared as a witness in connection with, an offense committed or alleged to have been committed by a young person.”

Basically it means that if a minor is the victim of a crime, then the media can’t run around saying the minor’s name. We have something similar here in the US and until recently, it’s usually been followed by most media outlets. That is, until the Internet came around.

Anybody who has tried censoring something on the net knows that it’s impossible. From illegal music downloads to sex tapes to smuggled footage of a protests in Myanmar. If it’s not being shown on TV, but people want it, then they’ll get it on the Internet. It’s as simple as that. But what happens when people inadvertently break the law while trying to do good? In Stefanie’s case, that’s exactly what happened, as multiple “tribute” groups were created in her memory. People wanted to show their support for her and remember her life together, but what they were inadvertently doing was breaking the YCJA by “reporting” on her death.

It’s a pretty slippery slope to navigate, but it’s one we need to look at, because “Facebook is the way of the future” and all that other crap. People are on the Internet more and more and we’re getting our news from it now more than ever in the past. What happens when somebody breaks a gag order by posting about something on their Facebook page. Or writing about it on their blog or away message? I certainly don’t have the answers, but what do you expect from me? When have I ever had the answers? Well, other than with all that stupid application spam. But I digress.

[via Social Times]

Facebook, Stefanie Rengel

Look out world, there are drunk chicks on Facebook. This is shocking news to me. Wait, did I say shocking? I meant sexy. Yes, this is sexy news to me, because drunk chicks are awesome. And they certainly make their parents proud when they have their druggen photos plastered all over the web and in the news.

Basically, there’s a group called “30 Reasons Girls Should Call It A Night” which has over 150,000 members. In it, there are more than 4800 photos uploaded of people passed out in funny positions, many without clothes, while drunk. As if that wasn’t enough already, The Daily Mail decided they wanted to run an article about the group and accompanied the article with almost more pictures than words. Which I’m pretty sure is proof that this was just a bored intern’s way of convincing his boss that he wasn’t wasting time while on the clock, but instead was “researching” and “article” while looking at semi-nude chicks. Smart kid, if you ask me.

Anyways, let this be a lesson to you young girls out there. If you take stupid, drunken, half nude photos of yourself and upload them to Facebook, you’re screwed. There’s no real way around it. Either a newspaper will publish them or you’ll end up featured on FBChicks. Either way, make sure you show enough skin to make it worth my time looking at all these photos!

Sexy Update: After all the different news attention this group got, there is now a website devoted specifically to the group, the girls, and the photos. God Bless America.

Facebook, drunk

In case you live under a rock (in which case, we need to talk, because I’ve always wondered how somebody could actually live beneath a rock), then you probably already know that late night funny man Stephen Colbert is running for President in his (and mine!) home state of South Carolina. What you might now know is that his Facebook group dedicated to his all-but-failed campaign is what some people estimate as being the fastest growing Facebook group. Ever. In just nine days, it peaked over 1,000,000 members. In five more days, it topped 1.3 million and as I write this now, it currently stands at 1,355,014 members. Not too shabby of a following for a “fake” campaign.

To put this into perspective, legitimate candidate Barack Obama might be one of the Democratic parties front runners for the nomination, yet his official Facebook group has only managed to snag 400,000 members in nine months. Critics often complain that young people in the 18-30 age group rarely vote enough, yet Stephen Colbert and Facebook actually stood a chance at changing that - even if they were only voting for a comedian. Sadly, Colbert won’t find himself on the South Carolina ballot, as they recently elected 13-3 not to allow him to appear on their ballot.

While this may be an unfortunate turn of events, there still is hope in the form of Colbert’s massive Facebook group. There’s already a large contingent of people organizing an e-mail drive to the South Carolina Democratic Party to protest their recent decision and my hunch is that if Colbert actually talks about this group on his TV show sometime soon, there could be even more half-shenanigans half-serious efforts displayed from the group in an effort to keep him in the race.

It’s times like these that make it quite fun to be on Facebook. Colbert in ‘08!

Speaking of drunken Facebook fun, it looks like Hugh Grant recently got his drink on and…well, I’m sure the rest of the evening was a bit too R rated to go into detail here on Facebook Talk.

But this brings me to another topic entirely. Where in the hell were all of these drunken celebrities when I was in college? Never once did I have a Hugh Grant or Bill Murray just wander into my dorm room looking for a refreshing beverage. The most famous person I ever drank with was my dad, but that doesn’t count since we’re related. I think the next most famous person was that RA during my junior year who owned three jet skis. He was a legend around campus!

[via Web Community Forum]

facebook, hugh grant, college parties, bill murray