About a few weeks ago I made the choice to deactivate my Facebook account for 2 months. Half of it was on a whim, but the other half was out of curiosity. I wanted to see if I left Facebook if I’d miss it.

Let me clarify and say that I was never addicted to Facebook. I was relatively casual with my usage. Facebook always has been my CNN for friends; meaning, I read status updates like I would news headlines. Since the advent of the FB news feed I used it more for consumption of friend info rather than using it to engage in any meaningful communication. If anything it seems Facebook just made it easier to stalk people.

With FB making it easier to casually stalk people I started to wonder if I needed to know all the updates that were going on in people’s lives. Not to say I don’t care about my friends on Facebook, but knowing what restaurant they just ate at, concert they attended, or new toy they bought just didn’t seem like it directly impacted my life.  I read an article or study that said that FB actually makes people depressed. The premise of the article was that since humans typically overestimate people’s happiness by looking at FB status updates we think everyone else is much happier, healthier, and wealthier than us which ends up making us depressed or less happy. Based on my experience it made sense to me. Rarely do people post the bad or embarrassing stuff that happens in their life. Most people on social networks post that which will make them look good, seem intelligent, get attention etc… The end result is through their updates we see a biased view of that person.

Some could argue when we meet people in real life this is no different. How people wear different masks and act happy when in fact they aren’t. I can agree with this. The difference, though, is that when we meet people in person we can read their body language. Most people can spot a fake or insincere person. However, on FB you don’t get that dimension so the happiness and awesome-ness of other people’s lives gets magnified.

In the end I’m curious to see if by not being on Facebook if I’ll notice being happier. So far I don’t miss it (and I’m sure not many people miss me). Haha, I just read that sentence … that sounded like something a depressed person would say!

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Why?  It all started out of boredom as I was playing around with Facebook settings.  I happen to click on in the section where it says you can change your name.   Facebook basically asks you for the name you are changing to so I typed in something ridiculous (I was kind of curious how crazy you could make them name before they would reject it), so off the top of my head “O’Mally Valdez” sounded good.  Later on I decided to add “Madoff” to the end after I read about how Whoopi Goldberg’s real name was “Caryn Elaine Johnson” and her mom suggested in order for people to take her serious she should add a Jewish last name…so hence Goldberg.  In my case I decided to choose a Jewish surname that would command respect and trust…hence “Madoff.”

So that’s how the whole name changing thing started.  (There was also a slight paranoid factor/motivation involved (in that I really don’t trust Facebook with all my real data so I try to give it fake data so at least this way Mark Zuckerberg can’t stalk me.)  Anyway, so I went ahead with the name change.

I assumed that people would know that I changed my name and that anytime they saw “O’Malley” in their feed they would realize it was me, however this was not the case.  I started noticing some interesting things.

• The number of friend requests I normally got decreased (this could be just because I ran out of friends…)
• When I would try to add people whom I knew and just met they would ignore my friend request
• One girl I met asked me for my Facebook name and I told her “O’Malley” and she said “No, really what’s your Facebook name?”  I swore to god that that was my name…but she wouldn’t believe me
• Less people responded to my status updates and general Facebook spewing (I attribute this to people looking in the feed and wondering “who the f*ck is O’Malley?” and then ignoring whatever was there
• One person actually thought my name was O’Malley and addressed me as O’Malley (just goes to show you how close Facebook friends are!)

Anyway, today O’Malley got hit by a bus and died.  So he no longer exists.  I’ll see if anything changes by using my “real name.”

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• A Facebook Application for dating
• Actually a Facebook application
• A Facebook Application to charge strangers money to have sex with your friends

What it is:

• An easy way to annoy and poke fun at your friends
• A method to imply that your friends support messages, products, causes which in fact they might not
• A way to pass the time on Facebook

How to Play:

1)  Select a Facebook advertisement that you want one of your FB friends to endorse.  In my example here I have chosen this Ad which is “Mom Builds Her Company”

2) Select one of your friend’s on Facebook which you would like to “pimp out.”  Or in this case which friend do you think would best represent the advertisement you have chosen.  In my case I felt my friend, we’ll call him Ed, would be a fitting spokesperson for a Mom who builds a company.  Grab a picture from their photos which you think would look best for the ad.  This one is a good one of Ed.

3) Edit the photo you selected so it fits in nicely with the advertisement you chose.  This take a little technical know-how, but you can use photoshop, paint, or whatever imaging program you like to use.  Once you have done that you should have something that might look like this:

4)  Post your newly created advertisement image into your Facebook feed by sharing the image.  Make sure to tag your friend and write a “cheeky” message along side it.  It’s up to you if you want to tell them it’s fake or not.   Here’s my example again.

5) Now wait and see if your friend responds.  If they don’t respond with their own advertisement you are considered the winner which gives you permission to continue putting them into fake ads.

The Inspiration

This game came about from this article i read about how Facebook is already inserting our profile photos (and other photos) into Facebook ads.  Apparently as a user of Facebook you have to go in and manually “opt out.”  I figure if they are going to do that i might as well make my own ads to help them.  You’re welcome Facebook.

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