October 15, 2007
Fear and loathing on Facebook
Where’s the love gone? Facebook seems to be adding more enemies than friends these days.
First, the blogmeister Dave Winer writes a post called Why Facebook Sucks, criticising it as an address book that he can’t export to other formats.
Then Robert Scoble, the biggest Facebook friend collector, agrees the social networking site sucks “because it isn’t scalable and falls apart at 5,000 contacts. It pisses me off more and more every day because of that scaling wall. Damn I wish I hadn’t locked my Rolodex in this trunk.”
Of course, few people have 5,000 friends on Facebook and many may be irritated by inaccurate descriptions of it as a glorified address book.
In which case, they may like to make enemies of Messrs Winer and Scoble through Enemybook “an anti-social utility that disconnects you to the so-called friends around you.”
Adding this Facebook application, or a similar one offered by Snubster.com, can quickly dissociate you from erstwhile friends and put the mark of Cain on others.
And if you’re feeling particularly misanthropic, Techcrunch points out that Hatebook.org is a German-built doppelganger to Facebook.
Upload blackmail material, publish lies and take over the world, the service promises. There’s even an Ask Dr Evil section that puts a new spin on hate mail.
