Just fan off!

Farcebook. It is the source of constant amusement. It is the place where you learn who has mastered the English language, as opposed to those people who think "aswell" is one word.

Recently, there has been a swell in the number and scope of fan pages on FB. And some of them are, to put it bluntly, staggeringly pathetic.

For example:


Of course, this is just subterfuge. Becoming a fan of "I hate battery low" really means, "I am hopelessly unable to manage the mind-numbingly simple task of making sure my laptop/mobile/mp3 player doesn't run out of power, and want to both announce this fact to all of my friends AND yet hide it behind a veneer of it not being my fault".

But what else are my friends becoming fans of? Let's see...

Jelly Tots !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Now, I like jelly tots as much as the next man (unless the next man is diabetic, of course). But I will never become a fan of anything that uses fifteen bloody exclamation marks. For pity's sake...

Cuddling, Partying, Hot Baths, Kissing, Sex, etc...
I mean, honestly, what's the point? Who wouldn't be a fan of these things? What's next... Hey, everyone, I'm a fan of breathing. I'm a fan of oxygen. I'm a fan of using Facebook like a pillock. Pur-leese!

I'm not going to confine this Farcebook rant to just fan pages, though. Oh, no! You see, there is something else troubling me at the moment, something which used to be confined to group emails but is now waved in my face every time I access my Farcebook home page: "What kind of [insert random item here] are you?"

I don't give a rat's arse what element I am; what my completely arbitrary "personality evaluation" is; which character in [insert name of TV show] I am most like; how much knowledge of [insert subject or person] I have; or how runny my last shit was. Seriously - there is a Farcebook Bristol Stool Scale application. That's taking "too much information" into unexplored territory.

I don't want to shout about these things, because you're my friends, and if you wanted to know, you would use your own knowledge or, and this might come as a shock to the application writers on Farcebook, you would ask me. Farcebook doesn't let me ignore just applications on my home feed - I either have to ignore every sodding new test that comes along, or take the easy route of ignoring any friends that inadvertently fill my feed with utter crap. Which means that, should they post something I might want to know about, I don't get to see it, because I've blocked them - because I don't care which sodding Care Bear they are most like.

My main problem here is the fact that all these quizzes are for is to make users grant the people who created the tests access to their profiles. They do that when they click on the "accept" button that appears just before the test application loads. With that click, all of the personal details that are stored in their account are available to the people who made the test application. So, if you've filled in a number of these tests and are suddenly getting a lot more spam than you used to, now you know why.

So, Farcebook - please, please, please make it so that I can block all applications in one go. Please. That way, I will remain sane, despite no longer being privvy to the exact comparison between my friends and boybands.

And please, please, please make "profile harvesting" applications a breach of the T&Cs. In order to fill in a simple quiz, an application does not have a legitimate need to know my email address or my date of birth.

Perhaps I should create a fan page for everyone who agrees with me...?