Don’t get me wrong, Facebook is really cool. I have been reunited with a lot of old friends through the site, and it lets me keep up with all the little things that other people do which are of virtually no consequence to me.

I have two bones to pick with Facebook though. The first is applications. I can’t really blame Facebook itself for the plethora of utterly useless apps; Mark Zuckerberg probably didn’t sit in his office coming up with ideas like Vampire vs Pirate vs Freddy vs Jason or What Celebrity Are You OMG ITS SO ACCURATE I TOTALLY JUST SOILED MYSELF LOL. But one has to wonder exactly how many things a developer can do with a social networking site.

The other is the abundance of stupid groups. Some are actually pretty useful and can easily push information to activists. For example, I’m very concerned with the brutal copyright legislation that our MPs keep trying to slide behind our backs when we’re not looking. If I miss something in the news, the Fair Copyright for Canada group alerts me when something is about to go down. Others, though, are a bit less useful. I’ll classify them thusly.

1. Just a Stupid Idea

Everyone who has well meaning but fairly dim friends has probably been the recipient of e-mails to this effect, and now that Facebook has made it even easier, this figure has likely skyrocketed. Every so often, someone will come up with an idea that’s fundamentally flawed, yet they’re not smart enough to realize it, and they get so impressed with their own genius that they jump out of their chair and fall flat on their face. After they recover from their short-lived concussion, they create a group and send an invite to everyone whose acquaintance they’ve ever met. Unwilling to question their supposed genius, their friends pass it on to other friends until it becomes an epi-dumb-ic.

My favourite is the Don’t Buy Gas Day one. If you haven’t received this yourself, the message urges those who are fed up with the rising price of gas (who isn’t?) not to buy gas on a certain day, so the oil companies lose millions of dollars in sales on that day and will lower their prices as a result. Unfortunately, there’s a pile of something foul-smelling right next to it: if you don’t buy gas on one day, you’re just going to buy the gas either the day before Don’t Buy Gas Day or on the next day, resulting in a net loss of $0 for Big Oil. Some incarnations of this campaign even proceed to roll around in said excrement by encouraging this process. Since this just keeps popping up, I am wondering if people just don’t get it, or they’re just doing it intentionally to provoke inexplicably angry bloggers.

2. Money Comes out of Nowhere

This is a really subclass of Just a Stupid Idea, but being so unfathomably idiotic that even an intoxicated chimpanzee would do a double take, it warrants a category of its own.

“For every person who joins this group, $20 will be donated to [breast cancer/orphans/starving children/victims of Katrina]!”

Oh really? And who is going to make with the cash?

This reminds me of the messages I used to get on ICQ. (Anyone remember ICQ? MSN and AIM are still not as good as ICQ was!) Those messages had to be short, so the sender only had about 1000 characters to convince you to forward the message to everybody on your contact list. One of the reasons given was that somehow Big Brother was tracking the flow of the message and if you forward it to everyone on your list, [Microsoft/Trump/Turner/other rich white dude] would donate $10 to charity.

One group I saw finally explained this to me: when you join the group, you are supposed to donate said money to the charity. But if you need to do that anyway, what’s the point of the group? Oh yeah, nothing.

3. Us vs. Them

This one is a manifestation of a common misunderstanding a lot of people (especially young ones) have about the world. According to this ideology, there are two types of people in the world: us, who are common people like you and me, and them, who are the rulers of the world and control everything from what is on television to where you can go play. This leads to ill-conceived “petitions” like Re-Open Smith’s Restaurant on King Street. Unfortunately, Junior, there’s probably a reason why Smith’s Restaurant is closed. Maybe the guy didn’t pay his taxes and the government shut him down. Maybe there were rats there. Maybe it was an architectural abscess and the city wanted it gone. Or maybe the place just sucked and wasn’t making any money. No matter how much complaining you do on Facebook, Smith’s ain’t coming back. Instead, why not get some answers from the person who is actually involved: Smith!

Another example of this is a petition to stop someone from doing something you find objectionable. Unfortunately, this person might live in another part of the world where that culture considers it acceptable. Maybe they don’t even exist and someone’s playing you for a fool. Either way, if you want to do something about it, you need to take it up with someone who is in a position to act. Or act yourself. There is no magical “they” people that are going to notice your Facebook group and say, “oh, I better stop this at once!”

I could come up with countless others, but I’m a little tired so I’ll let you get back to your regularly scheduled programming. Which is probably either sleeping or doing nothing. Doesn’t matter. Argh.