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How Did I Get Over 5,505 Facebook Friends?

I am always confounded by Facebook.  The social service is always changing things behind the scenes.  Nothing I look for a second time is ever found in the same place.  I wonder if that’s done by design or sheer arrogance?

My latest confoundidery happened last week when I discovered, for some reason, I had over 5,505 friends!  You can see in today’s screenshot of my Facebook page that number has dipped to 5,501 — I lose and gain friends all day long in bunches of threes and fours for reasons I have not yet been able to divine — and I have no idea how I was able to leap over the infamous and mean Facebook 5,000 friend barrier because I haven’t actively made any friends requests in over a year.

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Focusing on Facebook Timeline Body Image

There is a fantastic scene in the groundbreaking film Mean Girls (one of the last good films with Lindsay Lohan in it, as far as I am concerned) in which the characters are all looking in the mirror and criticizing themselves. Lindsay Lohan’s character, having lived in South Africa until that year, thinks to herself that she was only aware of girls being fat or thin and didn’t realize how many things could be wrong with someone as her schoolmates criticize their hairline, pore size, and bad breath. There is a whole new monster that has reared its ugly head in the world of self hate and its name is Facebook.

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Who Started the Fire? Plutarch or Yeats?

Who started the fire?  Was it Plutarch so many years ago, or was it W.B. Yeats not too long ago?  The quotation in question — “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire” — is extensively used in education, and in arguments about scholarship and proper attribution the world over.  Here’s that quote, found right on the main page of Gallaudet University’s Department of Education, attributed to “William Yeats:”

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Taking Tragic News With A Grain of Salt

On Monday, I learned a powerful lesson about the news and social media and how what we share with our friends can be ever so slightly shifted to show just what your friends want to show you — although this is only because this is the same side of an issue that they were shown. There was a tragedy in France in the form of a shooting at a school — a Jewish school, to be specific. A teacher, his two children and another student were killed in the attack.

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Facebook Gets Student Arrested

A man slowly ascends the stairs of a tall building. He has an assault rifle strapped to his back and carries a megaphone in one hand. When he gets to the roof he looks down on the hundreds of people walking down the street and calls for their attention. He watches carefully as they gather around in the street below and when just enough people are listening he lifts the assault rifle in one hand and puts the megaphone to his mouth and says, “Ladies and gentlemen… I own an assault rifle illegally!” Within minutes he is arrested and nobody is surprised. Why then would someone do the online equivalent and provide photographic evidence to the world, including the police that eventually arrested said someone?

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Facebook Warns Me Against Accepting New Friendships

Why does Facebook insist on continuing to tell me who my friends are and are not?  On August 27, 2010 I wrote — Facebook as Probiotic: I Now Have 5,000 Friends — and I was delighted I had so many new and coveted virtual friends on Facebook:

The Facebook friends count is volatile as it jumps by a count of ten and then drops by ten throughout the day.  One moment, you have 4,900 friends and the next time you update the page moments later, you’ve dropped down to 4,890 friends — that makes adding new friends a bit perilous and hard to predict because Facebook is sensitive if you try to add too many friends too fast, or if you accept too many new friendships too quickly.

Facebook will not hesitate to warn you against — or even ban you from — adding too many friends.  I don’t understand why.

Facebook have always been bullies and censors when you try to add new friend requests if they don’t think you really really truly know those people — and they block you.  That is annoying and irritating.

This week, Facebook started a new bullying ploy from the other side of the “friending” dyad — harassing ME if I want to accept a NEW FRIEND invitation from someone else they don’t think I know!  Here’s the screenshot proof:

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Eben Moglen and his Facebook Death Wish

Our beloved and respected Eben Moglen is back in the news this week.  We met Eban a year ago during his FreedomBox days:

SuperGenius Eben Moglen wants free and unfettered access to the internet and he’s putting his money where his mind is by creating the “FreedomBox” — a device that plugs into the wall and gives you unfettered and unrestricted access to the internet — to help make certain that a government cannot disconnect its people from communicating with the rest of the world during a perceived crisis.


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David vs. the Google Goliath

We all love fighting a good moral brawl.  When Slide stole 3,000 fake money coins from me in April of 2009, I was livid and I wrote about it in the early morning hours of the 23rd:

I enjoy playing Slide.com’s SuperPoke Pets and I’ve raved about SuperPoke Pets and ranted about SuperPoke Pets. Today, I am enraged — not by the game I have come to love — but rather by the lack of an artful and loving Slide.com technical response to what should have been a simple problem to solve.  This is the story of a false accusation — an unfair incarceration of character if you will — and its ultimate unraveling in the light of indisputable, human, facts.

After I wrote my article, Google bought Slide for $200 million and recently decided to close down all the Slide games.  There is now no more SuperPoke Pets.  The game is over. People are furious.  I was intrigued that I was mentioned last week in a Facebook comments stream where people are trying to save the game:

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Uptick in Facebook Friend Requests in the Wake of Google+

I have a lot of Facebook friends, but I could have so many more if Facebook would allow me to “friend” more than 5,000 people and if others could “friend” me without getting a message that “this user has too many friends.”

The Facebook friends count is volatile as it jumps by a count of ten and then drops by ten throughout the day. One moment, you have 4,900 friends and the next time you update the page moments later, you’ve dropped down to 4,890 friends — that makes adding new friends a bit perilous and hard to predict because Facebook is sensitive if you try to add too many friends too fast, or if you accept too many new friendships too quickly.

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Your Facebook is Leaking

Did you know your Facebook privacy has been leaking?  As that social network expands to flow like a never-ending molasses across the grimacing façade of the nameless masses — suffocating us in pokes and Mafia War requests — we need to pause a moment and step back to wonder just what’s happening to us beyond the velvet curtain.

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