Facebook and Moods.

My absence on the humor side is all involuntary, the financial crisis and the way it unfolds is not funny, but then without a bit of humor we might as well take the plunge into the shark pool. However, of late I have been fascinated with the networking of the thing called Facebook. Well with close to 2000 'friends' I think I can be a bit of an authority on the facebook phenomenon. Here are some of the observations I have picked up after a year of accumulating friends.

Facebook is a great place to let people know you are alive and post the odd photo of your child, pet, car or the latest trophy girlfriend, (do not forget to delete the ex), and yet its a great mood barometer. People will post stuff there to their near and dear 2000 odds friends about their moods which they would not normally talk to their shrink about. One posted something about the ensuing ups and downs with her boyfriend. Now why would you want a network to know that 'he doesn't touch me the way he used to', or in another case, 'i am menopausal today' or a man announcing 'I am turning 50 want a fling before closing down'. I suspect any one of those mood announcements would ofcourse have prompted a myriad of emails and offers; from the sleaze to the imaginative.

Ofcourse, there are other more amazing cat fights that occur, one was over who owned my Black Stallion, (I am talking of a real horse you gutter bags who thought otherwise), and it was amusing that people who had not seen him insisted it was 'their baby'. The honor must indeed go to the one where a woman posted what she thought were emails straight on her facebook page and pretty much poured out her sexual life and fantasies in one click of the button 'share'.

Now that is interesting 'Share', but with who? Your nearest and dearest 2000 friends who would not recognize you if you walked past them, or perhaps just pick up the phone and call the real friend. But then facebook, Hi5, Myspace etc etc all fill a void for us, it allows us to vent. But venting in public is a hard thing, even though we can press the 'remove' button and hope people have not seen what mood you were occupied with the previous night, invariably the damage is done.

Is Facebook then the moral equivalent of what the movie The Invention of Lying suggests; a world where people never lie. So can we in facebook simply tell someone how terrible they look in the photo they posted or just be polite and ignore the booger coming out of their nose as they surface, in the photo, from the Aegean Sea on their holiday in Greece. (See what I have just done, now every one of 2000 friends who went to Greece on a holiday will be spending hours checking their Greek holiday snap shots on Facebook).

I love this tagging of photos, its great. I tag my friends in my photos, and then when I am pissed off with them then I un-tag them. If that does not get them the message I can always remove the friend, assuming in that one stroke I have just got rid of the person for real. Usually that does get the message. Well I do notice some people who are total psycho's who do that to me and delete me because they are pissed. I wait three weeks, add them back again, and guess what their bi-polar moment has passed so they accept me as a friend. It does not take them long to get pissed at me and delete me again. This is better than Farmville, a game on facebook, and why not rename Facebook to Friendville?

Now someone studying for exams and announcing it is fine, almost a 'DO NOT Disturb' sign and that works, but then announcing, 'I want.....' well that is a bit too forward for even my liberal bent of mind. The better ones are always the people who will change their announcement like 20 times a day, and somewhere along the way forget that people can read the comments too, so its interesting what comes out of the comments.

I find the strangest to be the ones who join facebook under false names and feel they will never be found out. Men forget their gender and start communicating in the masculine tense not realizing they have been pretending they are a woman, or indeed vice versa.

More alarming is how some people will come of facebook and then shun it and say its too invasive. A model I knew argued she didn't like it and did not want any of her photos on facebook, but then why be there, just delete yourself, and ofcourse remember there are sites dedicated to you modeling photos?


Now facebook groups are another whole drama in their own sense. There are bizarre groups and deserve a piece on their own.

For the moment I love facebook, it ranks as the best entertainment I could ever wish for. Oh yes the psycho woman who keeps sending me emails there about this amazing real Pegasus horse, please read this and stop.