Unfriended!

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Anybody who wastes any time at all on facebook should certainly get the Unfriend Finder app. It is a thing of beauty: tells you who has unfriended you lately.

Maybe it’s perverse of me, but I think the history of unfriendings is a lot more interesting than the history of friendings. I don’t have many facebook friends, so I have a correspondingly small number of unfriends. But I treasure the ones I do have, and they are all big rah-rah’ers for Obie and the Dronocrats — the sort of people who are always posting little clips from some TV humorist, Bill Colbert or Steven Maher or somebody.

The only defect with Unfriend Finder is that it doesn’t tell you when, exactly, your new unfriends clicked you into Sheol. I would dearly love to figure out what sent each of ’em over the edge.

12 thoughts on “Unfriended!”

  1. Well, I only spend enough time on Facebook to post the link to my latest cartoon or video, maybe flip through the newsfeed and share any items that look worth it, and check my settings just in case Fuckerberg’s been jerking them around.

    I haven’t had any issues with being “unfriended” — not that I ever gave a shit — as I’m only “friends” with people who I actually know and work with in real life, and who I’m actually real-life friends with. It also helps that all the people I’m “friends” or “friends of friends” with are nasty-assed anarchist troublemakers with really bad attitudes about governance and “civil discourse”, so my feed isn’t overrun with Jon Stewart clips.

    My DW’s feed, of course, is packed to the gills with stupid jokes about Republicans, and more clips of Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert and Rachel Maddow than you can shake a stick at. When I finally broke down and set up a Facebook account — for my artistic alter-ego, of course; I’d never dream of having a Facebook account for my real self — the first thing she did was to pester me to “friend” her. Needless to say, my response was along the lines of “oh, f’crissake, why do we need to be Facebook ‘friends’? We’re fuckin’ married!”

    • Mike,

      Having ‘an attitude’ can, as you might know, be nicely positive.

      Unless its hard core ptsd like a friend of mine back in cruces
      had, e.g. woke up at 3:30 AM with his 45 against the head of
      his wife, and squeezing.

      Mostly developed after he’d been dropped alone into Cambodia
      and picked up two weeks late — very difficult period.

      Thankfully he has generally recovered.

  3. Kinda quiet. Shall we pour le main gauche now?

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJTUUKAdZDU

    Begins with a very audible contrabassoon, edits in snippets of delicious decolletage, features a blood-drawing keyboard glissando played forte at about 5:20 and a band of good-looking junger Leute suppressing obvious high spirits throughout.

    And originating in Weimar of infamous memory. So there may be hope, however distant.

  4. yeah, even though i – stupidly – signed on, facebook as a whole reminds me of a virus, a strange anti-social type easily providing info to gov agencies here and there hence my appreciation of MJS’s term ‘dronocrats’.

    such a kind way to put the sudden dismemberment
    of thousands of innocents……

    a su servicio
    Juan

    • I’ve always found it odd people are creeped out FB might give the FBI their drunken status updates and cat photos. Seems like the fact FB is gathering the information for its own purposes is creepy enough.

      Having said that FB got nothin’ on Google; who pretty much have a record of your entire online existence. And your ISP has a record of everything; a record the big ones, usually cable cos threatened by streaming and piracy, have every reason to “cooperatively” hand over, if they didn’t already.

      • ”An imminent report on an emerging threat to individual privacy to be issued by the European data protection authorities raises even more serious issues than those it is likely to address. The report will consider Google’s asserted right to expand its data mining to combine users’ personal data across all their accounts and services, including Gmail, internet searching, map and location information and photo sharing, with no way for individuals to opt out. At least one technology blogger has accused Microsoft of planning similar changes, while two new Facebook programmes to aggregate user data with other advertising and loyalty card data have also drawn concern. Whatever the merits of each case, the larger issue deserves greater public attention.”
        http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/15/google-data-mining-national-security
        —————————————————

        EFF Rates Google, Apple, Facebook On Protecting User Data Privacy –

        ”The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit digital consumer advocacy and civil liberties group, released its annual “When the Government Comes Knocking, Who Has Your Back?” report. The report analyzes the policies of major internet companies and some not so major ones, “including email providers, ISPs, cloud storage providers, and social networking sites — to assess whether they publicly commit to standing with users when the government seeks access to user data.”
        http://marketingland.com/eff-rates-google-apple-facebook-on-protecting-user-data-privacy-13391

        Right u are Peter but some care for a bit more privacy which, not perfect, can be obtained through VPN plus TOR
        [no doubt othr means as well].

  6. Knowing nothing about FB, I must ask: Can FB users simply look for someone whose internet presence they find offensive and “un-friend” them or do they first have to go through a ritual of becoming a friend before becoming an un-friend?

  7. ‘Tis the latter, although the former is a beautiful app for development. One could, using the FB interest filters, preemptively unfriend all B52 fans. True, “Unfriend Shack” has no ring. But still.

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