Facebook

I've been editing my new Facebook timeline a lot recently, and I'm not really sure why. I doubt that anyone is really going to go through the trouble of looking through all the years I've been doing stupid stuff on Facebook, because who the hell cares about me enough to want to do that?

But the fact that the site is now making it SUPER EASY to access all the stupid things I've done and said all those years ago? Oh God. Oh... oh God. It could very well be the death of me.

I've been mostly focusing my attentions on the year 2007 (because I hate that year), and in that process I have learned quite a bit about the proper way to influence your timeline. For one, you cannot simply just hide everything, because there will always be something else that'll pop up in its place that is equally undesirable. You have to be aggressive (I think... I don't know if there are a finite amount of spots along your timeline... if there isn't, then I'm just doing a lot more work than needed.)

One thing I can do is create status updates at this very moment and place them along my timeline with whatever date you want it to represent. So that means a little bit of control, as I can add pretty much complete nonsense and it would waste space and hopefully distract from other items along the timeline. Another thing is that there are dots along the middle, supposed to represent the items that appear on your timeline in a chronological order or something. But there are some dots that are not represented by anything on your current timeline... and when you hover over said dots, there will appear a potential item that *could* appear on your timeline with just one little click. A lot of these dots are wall posts by friends that mean nothing devoid of any context. And in this case actually... "friends" means really one friend that keeps popping up. Just about all of them have been added to the timeline.

Again, though... I don't know if this matters, because I could just be adding these items without it subtracting anything else like I would like it to. Maybe I should try counting items on my 2007 portion of the page and compare them to another year...

2007: 32 items...
2008: about 20...

... well crap.

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Another Facebook thing. I've written about it before, but around the time that groups were a popular thing on the site, I went sort of crazy and made a bunch of them. Most of them were pointless and made no sense. One of them was a group for a band that I liked, because there were no groups for that band and I had to be in a group for every band that I loved at the time. Because... you know, whatever. This was 5 years ago. I would have never thought about it again.

Except that somehow the page got a little bit popular. And every so often I would receive messages from a group member asking me to change something about the group. And I would still receive these messages, despite the fact that the band most likely had an actual fan page on Facebook by now. Somehow it still existed with a bit of minor activity. But all the old groups were scheduled to be archived, so... it was not long for this world.

Then recently, I received a notification from someone I didn't know. It was someone requesting that this group be updated, and save it from the archives for all eternity. I didn't think about it all that much. And I'm eager to please, so I updated it. BIG MISTAKE.

1) I'm in another group, so I knew that whenever someone posted in said group, you'd receive an annoying notification about it... but there is a way to turn the notifications off, so you'll never have to click on your notifications expecting someone to have finally replied to the hilarious status you posted, only to find out that it was just a post in the group you were in. So automatically I turned notifications off for my group, knowing that it was pretty active for some reason and that it would annoy the crap out of me receiving 5 notifications a day all pertaining to the group. This works about 50% of the time. The other 50%, it just notifies me anyway. Just because.
2) You cannot simply just "join" a group, like any rational person might expect. Nope, you have to be approved by an administrator of the group. Which is me. And somehow, despite the presence of the actual band Facebook page, people have sought this out and decided that they've wanted to join, with AT LEAST one person requesting to join since I've updated the group. And of course, with every request... I receive a notification about it.

Again, I created this in 2006. Back when I thought the site would become passe in a few years' time. And now it is work... albeit work that takes about 5 seconds a day.

The only real solution to this is to leave the group, which wouldn't necessarily kill it but instead leave it admin-less until someone else decides to take the task of running it. Which would be OK with me, except...

The group has over 4,500 members. It is by far the most popular thing I've ever created.

So I can't just leave it...