Mercy Killing: Self-Assisted Facebookicide Watch
Monday, February 8, 2010
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.
Posted by Botgirl Questi at 7:20 AM 5 comments Links to this post
Labels: "social networks" visualization, avatars united, facebook, twitter
Virtual Worlds, Mental Models and NLP
Friday, February 5, 2010
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.
Posted by Botgirl Questi at 8:30 AM 0 comments Links to this post
Labels: NLP, psychology
RANT ALERT: New Rules for Avatars on Social Networks
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
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:
Posted by Botgirl Questi at 10:47 AM 15 comments Links to this post
Labels: new rules




