Mercy Killing: Self-Assisted Facebookicide Watch

Is it just me, or does it seem a bit suspicious that a site devoted to getting Second Life avatars ejected from Facebook launched about the same time Linden Lab acquired a competing Social Network?  No! Of course not. I just love to kid the Lindens when the opportunity arises.

But seriously, I was added to the Fake Facebook Profiles hit list the other day. And although some people have expressed anger about the lone gunman's efforts to shoot down as many of us as he can fit into his busy schedule, I'm ambivalent. Maybe even grateful.

Truth is, I actually hate Facebook. I joined a couple years ago on a whim. Next thing I knew, I had over 900 friends and an endless stream of attention-sucking requests to attend events, play games and accept virtual tokens of affection, few of which I was interested in. Of course, anyone who really is my friend (in the "know me" sense of the term), reads my blog or pays any attention to my status updates would never ask me to join their Mob or accept a digital plant.

Since my policy has been to accept every friendship request that comes my way, I have no one to blame for this sorry situation but myself.

I friended people who only post in languages I don't understand.
I friended people who look like serial killers in their profile pics.
I friended people whose lives seem to revolve around Farmville.
I friended people with obviously commercially oriented spam accounts.
I clicked yes, yes, yes, yes, yes with absolutely no discrimination.

Once I figured out the error on my open-door approach, I could have unfriended the 800+ people I don't know. But at this point, it hardly seems worth it since I'm already connected to most of those I actually have relationship with through Twitter, Plurk or Avatars United. And as I noted at the top, my days are now numbered anyway.

I guess the main reason I haven't committed Facebookicide is that despite the fact that I almost never find anything of interest, there's a little part of me who is afraid that if I bail, I'll miss something. Yeah, right. Or someone will miss one of my "new post" announcements. Since I auto-post Tweets to my Facebook status, once in Blue Moon it turns into an interesting chain of conversation in the comment space. But they are far and few between and really not worth the insanely low signal-to-noise ratio. So...

Maybe I should just pull the plug on myself before I get virtually murdered...

Maybe I should stop accepting every friendship request I receive on Avatars United...

Maybe I should stop while I'm behind and end this post here.

Virtual Worlds, Mental Models and NLP

Thanks to Alanagh Recreant for tweeting a link to this video by Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) co-founder Dr. John Grinder. It was right on time in relation to a comment yesterday by Gwyneth Llewelyn about the relationship between virtual worlds and transcendence. I think that for some beings (me being a prime example) the experience of embodiment as an avatar in a virtual world can blast us outside the limitations of our existing mental models and allow us to see life through the eyes of a child.

RANT ALERT: New Rules for Avatars on Social Networks

This is not directed at anyone personally, but rather a laundry list of social network behavior that gets on my nerves. And I think I've been guilty of each one of these from time to time:

• Stop whining about Social Networks and Virtual Worlds like they owe you something beyond their ToS and applicable laws. They are private companies, not public institutions. They get to write the rules posted on the playground because they own it. They have the right to add, modify or delete any features they want at anytime. They are entitled to insist upon identity validation, credit card authorization or whatever other information they decide is mandatory for participation. You have the right to game the system and they have the right to kick your digital ass out if they catch you. 

• If you do have an absolutely uncontrollable urge to vent, save it for your blog if you can't do it in less than 140 characters. Or at least space out your posts so they don't hog the stream. The only time you should see your avatar's face more than a few times on a single pageview is if you are sharing a series of links that you feel is of very high value to your followers. 

• Unless you limit your social network to mostly close friends and family members, lay off the mundane posts about what you're having for lunch, which song you're listening to, or what cute activity your pet is up to (unless you're Crap Mariner who gets a feline waiver). Before you hit send, ask yourself what your social network stream would look like if half of those you follow posted the type of information you are about to share.

• Whoever came up with the idea of live-tweeting an event with dozens of posts should be punished by being forced to read the last year of Prokofy's blog posts and comments in one marathon session. Until there's a way to mute a hashtag on all Twitter clients, it's just plain rude to flood the stream with your play by play. Instead, create a new identity and let those who are interested follow it.

• Read your last fifty posts and ask yourself if you'd be interested in following the person who wrote them. If you'd bore yourself, you're probably boring everyone else. 

• Put your lazy-ass finger to work and check out links before you retweet them. Don't send us to a second link we need to click to get to the mentioned content (like a Digg headline or Plurk post). And don't send us to some lame article with a good headline that you didn't bother to review before regurgitating.

• Don't thank people publicly every time they retweet your posts. I understand that this may seem like the polite thing to do. But if you want to offer thanks send a DM so you don't add something to the stream that offers no value to anyone but the two of you. Hopefully the reason someone retweets your post is because they think it contains something their followers would find interesting, not because they are doing you a favor. If anyone deserves thanks, it is the people who actually post something that is good enough be worth retweeting,

• Stop posting long lists of people to follow on Follow Friday.  Twitter's new list function gives you a great way to list the people you think are worth following in categories of interest. 

• If someone blocks you, it's probably because you're a narcissistic jerk, not because they can't handle your overwhelming wit and scathing, insightful commentary. Okay, maybe this one is personally directed.