Slashdot Mirror
New Apps Enable Social Network Snubbing
beafpeat writes "Both The Boston Globe and NPR are reporting on new apps such as Enemybook and Snubster that parody the social networking phenomenon. 'Tired of bogus online friendships... [the creators] hope to encourage people to undermine, or at least mock, the online social communities sites such as Facebook were designed to create.'" Relatedly News.com wonders, with the opening of the Facebook API and the ensuing app frenzy, how much is too much of a good thing?
There really is no problem with the way Facebook is setup (apps are, overwhelmingly, useless and stupid but maybe there are some useful ones, I don't know). The problem is how people use the system. But you don't have to use it like that. Just a few days ago someone from my high school tried to add my as a friend on Facebook. I had never heard of this person before, couldn't remember speaking to or seeing them even once. She did go to the same high school as me, but we weren't friends. Ignore request.
Don't add people that you aren't/weren't actually friends with, and ignore requests from people who are just trying to increase their friends count and e-penis size. These websites are as useful as you make them.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
I think its less a sense of humour loss and more an overdeveloped sense of political correctness. It just seems that half the western world wakes up in a morning looking for ways to be offended. And if they can't take offence directly they do it by proxy, taking offence for some random social demographic who they feel *would* be offended if they knew about it.
Indeed it is. I work with a guy who made something like this in another city. It was basically a site where you talk bad about other people you know 'anonymously'. Everyone was from the same little area that knew about the site, so it quickly grew out of hand and I believe he said he had to take it down 2 days later because of all the threats.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
The -or ending was the original form from Latin, and quite popular with our ancestral brethren, too. Much like the change of hw- to wh-, you can thank the French for numerous boggling aspects to the English language.
Facebookake.