This post is a break from my usual crisp style travel log entries. This one is an occasional rant that I had stopped for quite a while. Seems like I need to take up this again. This one is about Facebook, the second most used website in the world, first being Google, of course.
If you are a Facebook user, you must have seen ads on the right hand-side of your browser. You tell me how appropriate they are. It's always about "Meet Hot Singles in your area" or "Come Meet Me" with a scantily dressed pretty girl's image. You know what I am talking about. We have all seen it and despised it. I devised an excellent plan to get rid of these spam style ads that are customized for every user based on the information they have entered in their profile or contents of posts/status messages. All it took was one single variation in my profile information page and I have never seen those inappropriate ads again.
Well, what did I do, you must be wondering. Simply unchecked the box "Single" in relationship status page. The profile page did not display anything about my status and so this "benefit of doubt" worked out in my favor. Facebook ad program assumed I was not single anymore and stopped displaying ads with pretty ladies. Now I get ads about "Fly Cheaply to China" or "Rent Textbooks Cheaply". Much less annoying.
After the success of "get-rid-of-undesirable ads" mission, I decided to experiment with Birthday wishes posts on Facebook. I wanted to see how many Facebook users actually remembered their friends' birthday. On your birthday, your Facebook Wall is flooded by seemingly alike scores of single liner birthday wishes, yet that brings joy to your life because you are under the impression that there are so many friends out there who care for you. The fact that more than half of them may have simply written that because they saw birthday message post(s) on their homepage or saw the birthday notification does not even cross your mind. You want to think like an optimist. That's fine.
I devised an experiment to isolate the effect of birthday information on Facebook profile page. Two weeks before my birthday, I removed birthday information from my page which meant that my friends could not see any birthday notification on their home page. I wanted to see how many people would actually remember my birthday. In the past, I had received birthday wishes exceeding fifties on Facebook. Guess how many I received after removing birth date from my profile page? None. Nil. Right.
The experiment was far from complete yet. I still needed to verify that people solely depended on Facebook information for birthday wishes. So, a few days before April 1, I changed my birthday to April 1. Some people may have realized I was just trying to fool them but still I received more than 50 birthday wishes. I'm not kidding. This experiment that I carried out appears so silly that anyone would be highly reluctant to give it any credibility yet, it speaks volumes about behavior and reliance of Facebook users on the information displayed on Facebook page.
So, what's the moral of this story? You tell me.
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