BREAKING: I Just Stepped In Dog Shit

In 2 days I’ve got my mock exams. I’ll be tested in almost every subject, and come out the other side with a gleam of satisfaction, an inner beacon of hope for my future, about how I performed.

Or rather, I won’t, because I haven’t revised enough. Some might say I have, and that I just have no idea how much time I should revise for so I don’t know if I’ve done enough. But I suspect the real culprit for taking away my time is Facebook.

Boring old people who fear the internet almost as much as the onset of _____ feel Facebook is an all consuming disease, which steals young lives and sucks them into a dangerous world of ones and zeros. But since I’ve never really cared what octogenarian technophobes think, I believe Facebook is pretty good. A hub of activity, where you can access anything and (almost) anyone, anytime you like.

However, herein lies the problem.

Whereas I see Facebook as a worthy part of life, some people see it AS their life. There are strange people out there, people who spend their whole time re-reading people status updates, killing time as they wonder who to “poke” next, or on those special occasions, “superpoke”. Usually it’s the same person.

To back this up I did a little research. I shifted through the far reaches of the Google search index and found a site devoted to Facebook news feeds. A site for people with strange habits who browse through Facebook home pages to stick the stupidest ones online, just so people can stare at them and think “wow, look at how empty that bastards life is, he’ll be blogging next!”. What a faggot. But here are some the statuses:

¾    I’m eating my tea

¾    Boo… Its raining

¾    Is Wondering What To Do

¾    A dog chewed my sandals while I was in the shower

¾    This chicken tastes funny

And my personal favourite:

¾    BREAKING: I just stepped in dog shit

How empty must that bastards life be if stepping in shit is breaking? People like these should all bugger off to twitter, where they’ll be a damn sight easier to ignore and ten times more likely to fit in.

But maybe I have this all wrong? Maybe I shouldn’t be thinking why people have famous Facebook addictions; perhaps I should be looking at why they’re actually on Facebook in the first place? I know from experience that they’re not there because of its usability, every time I get used to the layout and style of the thing, they decide to go and change it. Great, except when they do change it, all that happens is that they make it worse. I came in 3 versions of Facebook ago and I thought it was pretty good. Simple, and everything was where you hoped it would be. But then they bought out another one and buggered it up. When I got used to that, they changed it again. I don’t know how many times Facebook has changed, but I know in 2 years it’s changed 3 times. Since Facebook was started in 2004, I guess it’s changed about 9 times as of 2010.

How can a website that changed so much have 400 million users? It makes no sense to me. But after some thought, I’ve got it. There’s simply no alternative. As far as I can determine, it has few competitors. Twitter, MSN, Bebo, and Tumblr. That’s about it. Twitter is for people who do almost nothing with their lives but think they’re the centre of everything. MSN is made by the people who brought you Vista and Internet Explorer. Tumblr doesn’t have chat. But that still leaves Bebo, which is almost the same as Facebook but doesn’t have any apps, so it’s right out.

That must be why Facebook survives then. Not because it’s good, or because its somehow more appealing, but because everything else is crap.