In Ultimate Frisbee, that is…
ValleyWag has a funny story about how a group of Facebook employees laid the smackdown on Google’s own team, which has lead to them vowing revenge or something. Frankly, I got bored with this story right after I saw the words “Ultimate Frisbee,” but that’s because I’m a manly man who only enjoys real sports. Like football and baseball and ice dancing. Wait…crap!
Chalk this story up to yet another person not understanding how “dangerous” a pissed off teenager and the Internet can be.
A few days ago, a Virginian high school senior in by the name of Dave Kori woke up to find that school wasn’t canceled. So he looked up the listed phone number of Dean Tistadt, the man in charge of making the decision, called up his house, and left a message asking why. I should say that there’s no recording of his initial phone call, which might have been very nasty to begin with, but we’ll never know. Why? Because the focus is being, um…focused…on the phone call he got in return!
Turns out Dean wasn’t home. But his wife was! She proceeded to leave him a scathing phone number demanding he never call their house again and to get over it and go to school. So what did he do? Naturally, he made a Facebook page, listing his phone number and work e-mail and posted a video of the recording to YouTube.
Did Kori “cross the line” in terms of etiquette and good manners by posting the recording to YouTube? Probably, but as others have pointed out, this is more of a generational gap than anything. Plus it’s hilarious when it’s not happening to you!
Below is video from the CNN news report, which talks about the story, has a recording of the angry message, and a screen shot of the Facebook page. I’ve yet to find a link to said Facebook page, but then again I only tried for about 8 seconds and then got distracted by a flashing banner ad asking me to throw a banana at a monkey.
For a copy of the entire message, read on.
What the hell does it mean to poke someone anyway?
If you were sitting around today wishing there was a parody of those stupid eHarmony commercials where Facebook somehow played a role, then I’ve got good and and bad news for you. On the upside, today is your lucky day, as such a video exists. On the downside, you’re probably like the bearded dude near the end of this clip.
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.
Men…okay, boys…I need you to have a seat. We need to talk. A while back, I was tipped off to a site that may ultimately change all of our lives. For the better. No, I’m not talking about Facebook, for if you don’t already know about FB, then something is seriously wrong with you.
No, instead, I am talking about Facebook Chicks. I don’t think it’ll be too long before we start talking about this site in the same breath as Google and YouTube. Gone are the days of mindless surfing through random photos in your school network in search of that elusive “hottie” that you can then start to Facestalk. For Facebook Chicks now brings us daily postings of hot chicks everywhere! Just click your state on the sidebar and voila!, you’ve got pictures of awesomeness most likely containing a few ladies you might actually know.
Of course, some people think this is an “invasion” of property or “immoral” to some degree. And to those people, I have two questions. Are you hot and are you female? Because if so, I’m sure we’d all love to see a few snapshots of you.
Oh, whew, sorry about that Mr. Giuliani, it’s only your daughter Caroline who is an imcoming freshman at Harvard this fall. For a minute there I thought it was a terrorist. Possibly one from 9/11. You remember that, right? Back when you were mayor of New York. I wasn’t sure, I hadn’t heard you mention it in the past 12 minutes, so I thought you might had forgotten.
So let’s see what your daughter is up to. I see her political affiliation is liberal. Hmm, that’s a little interesting. Wait, what’s that newsfeed of hers say? “Caroline has left the group Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack).” Oh. Oh my.
I really hope for your sake that you don’t lose by one vote in 2008, Mr. Giuliani. No wait, I do hope that little scenario plays out, as that would be utterly hilarious. Now to find the Facebook profile of Dick Cheney’s daughter!
[via Slate]
Facebook, Slate, Rudy Giuliani, Barack Obama, Harvard, Dick Cheney
Armchair GM has a funny article about what it might be like if pro athletes were on Facebook. Damn that news feed!
Facebook Talk is a proud member of the Shyzer Network. We are in no way associated nor endorsed by Facebook.com. Please review our privacy policy
