Monday, October 08, 2007

Facebook Status: Tim is NOT your BFF.

BFF
Elizabeth Today at 12:09pm You're not my BFF? Since when?? I'm going to go and cry now. Anyway, I am really curious as to the context surrounding that little status note.
Tim Today at 12:44pm That message was not directed at you. Besides, isn't your BFF supposed to be Jesus? The background is that I received a series of messages from the Top Friends application. There are a number of things wrong with this in itself (which I enumerate below), but the content of the messages was as follows: "So-and-so thinks you are BFFs and would love to be added to your Top Friends. Please add So-and-so today :) " Needless to say, I found this EXTREMELY annoying. 1) Facebook is not MySpace, or at least that's what I keep telling myself. 2) The term BFF stands for "Best Friend Forever". Given the meaning of "best" and "forever" in the English language, you cannot have a list of BFFs. You can only have one (for all time), who is the "best". 3) I don't want to receive this kind of e-mail. It is spam by the application developers who want to market their application by making it as in-your-face as possible: the exact type of marketing that I most despise. I have taken this issue up with Facebook support, and the only "solution" they offer is to individually "block" annoying applications. They offer no option to disable all non-installed applications (or even all applications). 4) Given the above, anyone who installs and uses an application such as this, and then proceeds to spam me with inane messages is not my BFF.