Facebook's Worst Habits

Wow, you sure are on Facebook alot and look at all those Tweets! Hey, wait a minute, those are all machine generated or links!

Want to look like you are connected? Do you want to push your tweets past 10K? Then you do what some people are doing. Fill your Facebook and Twitter with automated updates of your horoscope. I am all for possibly knowing what my day might be like, but I really don't need to know what yours will be by way of an online application that you have no input, other than applying it to your Facebook.

Curmudgeon

Underneath this pleasant exterior lays a curmudgeon, if you squint hard enough you will see an old cranky man sitting in a lawn chair with a bucket of rotten tomatoes, ready to be lobbed at the nearest rascal taunting him with useless information. I have an average attention span or what you can call Focused Attentionof eight seconds. If I am scrolling through the latest updates on Facebook, I only need a couple of seconds to know whether I want to investigate further. Then I will enter Sustained Attention and give you the full treatment of a comment back.

The Cloak of Invisibility

If you post news feeds on a continuous basis, and never offer any opinion of your own, I put the Cloak of Invisibility on you. Which means I am going to Hide you on Facebook. Hide is a nice tool that you can implement when you just can't handle all the information being thrown at you, it's like ear plugs. You hit the Hide button and Bingo! That feed is gone. No more New York Times articles or the latest doings on TMZ. Thank you very much.

Welcome to Siberia

Siberia is where only the most egregious go. That's called the "List" on Facebook. I can set up a list that controls what you see on my page. I can whittle it down to just my name. It's not as bad as being Blocked, which means they can never search for you or see your posts, and you can't see theirs (its a two way street that ends in a Siberian cul de sac).

"Oh Now You Want To Talk"

For those who just fill their pages with retweets, filler applications or RSS feeds, you need to engage me. How am I to know who you really are? I already know what your astrological sign is, and what online news you read, but what else? If we sat down for coffee, I've already used up my first opening line of "what is your sign", where do we go from there? Being online is the same as being offline, you are only as interesting as what you put out to the world. So stop feeding me regurgitated links, start telling me who you are. And I promise not to throw a tomato at you.

Image: Ophelia Chong / Attention Deficit