Facebook, The Fake Book

 it would be the 3rd largest in the world, behind only China and India.

Facebook sucks! That's a pretty strong statement considering the 500 million Facebook users who may disagree with me. The fear that someday everyone will be reduced to a number has come to fruition. Welcome. Are you user number 21, 996,555 or 4,567,890? Are you Jennifer's 50th friend or 640th? You see, facebook is currently worth about $25 billion so they very much care if your number is on the board. Congratulations! And your friend, Jennifer, wants as many friends as possible to add "value" to her social status. Who knew you'd be more important as a number than an actual human being? That's terrific!

Who has hundreds, thousands, of friends? Really? Yes, I "know" hundreds of people, but there are categories they fall into that aren't represented on a facebook account, such as "acquaintances", "cashiers I talk to at the grocery store", "someone I said 'hi' to on Thursday", "people I know but don't trust with my personal info", and finally "online only friends".

I've heard the testimonials about how people have reunited with friends and family. But I've also seen the opposite occur firsthand. Mothers who ignore their immediate family, you know the husband and children who live right in their homes, so they can reconnect with long lost BFF's from high school. It's almost un-conventional for me to say this, but facebook has reconnected people with others, yet disconnected them from their real world and the people sitting right next to them.

"But", you say "facebook has really broadened your social circle". And I say, as humans, we really weren't meant to be spread this thin. We weren't meant to have 600 friends.In fact, a close friend of mine did not even notice when I took her off my "friend" list, being one of her 400+ friends. And again, here's my theory; it's impossible to have hundreds of friends. I'm sure she noticed when her crops were starting to die on the one of many famously addictive fb games, Farmville. You would certainly notice if your friend moved out of state, but not if they removed themselves from your fb friend status.

A fb statistic states if someone logs onto fb once that day, they will come back almost every hour for the next six hours.It's like a bodily function because that's as many times as I go pee in a day. That number increases substantially if you are connected with your mobile phone. Also, over half of the users log in every day. No wonder, many employers ban fb at work to discourage workers from "wasting time".

Warm and fuzzy thoughts come to mind when I think of the premise in which facebook was created. Take your pick; anger and revenge, hacking into personal files, disregard of social etiquette, enable college kids to have more sex, to be popular, stolen ideas, and ultimately a string of lawsuits.

First of all, Mark Zuckerberg (along with a couple of dorm roommates), who "invented" Facebook originally facemash, had only one friend at the time of it's creation. Ironically, his best friend, Eduardo Saverin, going into the fb venture is no longer his friend and both filed lawsuits against each other. The lesson here folks, is quantity over quality. Dump and betray your best friend so you can have hundreds of other friends.

As you can see, Mark has done well for himself and now has an infinite number of friends at his disposal. Glad we could contribute to his inability to make friends in person and lack of social skills. He was often disappointed at his lack of social status on the Harvard campus where he attended college so creating fb was tinged with revenge. One may also add that fb helps those who don't know how to interact with people in person or opt out of putting the effort into learning this skill. Now they don't require social skills to make a friend. It simply requires an ability to operate a computer and create an online persona/profile.

Maybe I'm being harsh, after all, Mark has a gleaming smile on his face in every picture you see of him on the web. The recently released movie, "The Social Network", portrayed a very different image of this seemingly happy-go-lucky guy we see representing the face of facebook. Unfortuantely for him emails to some fellow Harvard students, who claimed (and sued) to have pitched the idea to Mark, have been leaked. In these emails, Mark tells them to F#?!! themselves in their ear. Pleasant young man. It must be noted that Mark claims the movie is fictional, but has also stated, "I just wished that nobody made a movie of me while I was still alive". Hmmm

• Jesse Eisenberg speaks about his fb experience. “I had the strangest experience,” says the 26-year-old of his week spent under an alias online to research playing the world’s youngest billionaire, Mark Zuckerberg, in “The Social Network.” “I didn’t put any of my real information in, then I got an e-mail suggesting ‘the following friends for you," and it suggested about five — and one of them was my sister’s best friend from high school.” He hesitates. “I don’t know how they found her. It’s both frightening and phenomenal that would happen.”

There is no question people's security is compromised on fb. This was a heated uproar in May 2010 when it was confirmed that people's security settings, well, lacked security. Nah, that can't be!! I wouldn't have suspected that from the creator of fb who presently considers himself an "expert hacker." RECENT ARTICLE: Security Breach http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304772804575558484075236968.html?mod=yhoofront

Recently there was another security breach. Those that play certain games, even with strictest security setting on their accounts, were sold out to advertisers. Their information was leaked to advertisers. So this was mistake? Hmmm, interesting that advertisers are what pays Mark Zuckerberg's $6 billion salary and people's info was "accidentally" leaked to them.

• Chris Hughs, one of the creators of fb/former roommate of Mark Zuckerberg's, was enlisted by Obama to work on Obama's campaign. Chris blatantly states he doesn't really know what "community" means and he doesn't like to use that word. But he is responsible for a "virtual mechanism, scaling and supporting community action. Then that community turned around and elected his boss president. His key tool was My.BarackObama.com, or MyBO for short, a surprisingly intuitive and fun-to-use networking Web site that allowed Obama supporters to create groups, plan events, raise funds, download tools, and connect with one another", according to the article on Fast Company. http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/134/boy-wonder.html

"A close look at Hughes's efforts and their impact on the campaign sheds new light on Obama's success at the polls -- in both the primary and the general elections". Facebook helped elect Obama.This is great news if you are an Obama supporter, but not if you feel a little cheated by the results.

Other controversial topics concerning fb include:

• data mining
• people not using facebook for the "intended" purposes
• surveillance
• online bullying
• promotion of groups such as "pro-anorexia"
• Various features such as a "groups" feature that allows anyone to sign anyone up to a group as long they are on that person's friend list.
• no live support
• kids on fb- not a good idea. Fb was created to make people be/feel more popular and that's never a great message to send to kids. Fb also put them in harms way with online predators. I've seen kids, "tweens", and teens put up profiles that either make them look older, accidentally show personal information like home address, and/or put a fluffy pink kitten and unicorn as their avatar/fb profile picture. Online predators are looking for exactly those hints and dead give-aways.

Thanks for asking, and yes I have two. One for personal use and one for professional. My personal account consists of a meager number of friends and family. In other words, I've kept it simple. My privacy setting (hopefully) has me unavailable to be searched on fb. My professional page allows anything and everything, but you won't find much personal info on it.

There's a lot of conflicting notions about fb. How can someone feel special on their facebook pages when they are merely 1 in 500 million users? How can someone post status updates about what they are doing when they are always on fb? Do they actually find time away from fb to do something else? How can people really get to know each other on fb when people only post what they want others to know or see about them? Get a real life and grow a real garden! Speaking of gardens, too bad I've outstayed my welcome on this hub and don't have anymore room to discuss the silly games on fb.

Am I a hypocrit for stating my distaste of fb? Maybe, but so is Mark Zuckerberg for creating a website built around friends he never had and a social network in which he compensated for his inability to socialize. I just wanted to make people aware of how they're wasting their time.