Who's that knocking at my door?

There was a time in the distant past when logging on to my email was a welcome adventure. I didn't know what would be waiting, and the surprise was almost always worth it. This was late 1996, when email was still sort of new and when a day with 10 messages was a busy day.

Now e-mail is something of a chore, a lasso tying me to my obligations, a reminder I check by rote.

But I've been getting that same feeling of excitement I got back in '96 again, this time from this little guy:


When someone friends me on facebook, I have no idea who it might be. What part of my past will they remind me of? I like that feeling, but I can't help but see the writing on the wall -- facebook too shall pass.

Facebook continues to evolve, but do I?

Facebook has undergone its biannual renovation, and my review is mixed. My already overwhelming feed of friends' updates now contains a note every time they make a new friend, join a group, or brush their teeth.

The thing I like the most is the revamped suggestion box on the right.

I can't remember the last time someone encouraged me to poke a tree. Thanks, facebook.

Effectiveness breached

I'm by no means Magellan here, but I need to say that my facebook circle has become unmanageable. Here's what I'm talking about:


Forty-six updates during an afternoon nap. That's just too many.

It makes me think of a concept I read about a few years ago called the "Dunbar number." It's the maximum size a group can be before it becomes ineffective. It's generally said to be about 150, which means I'd have to pare my friends by about half.

For whatever it's worth, I only have one facebook friend actually named Dunbar.

I gladly accepted

A week ago, I said I was disappointed in the results of this year's World's Ugliest Dog contest, because the dog who "won" is actually kind of cute. I can reiterate my claim now that we're friends on facebook and I've perused his profile pics.

There's a simple explanation as to how I came to connect with this dog on a social networking website, but I think it's funnier if I don't get into it.

They should call it the Group of 40 oz.

That's a picture from this week's G-20 economic summit in London. Left to right, we've got hope mongerer Pres. Barack Obama, grope mongerer Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi, and nope mongerer Russian Pres. Dmitry Medvedev. ("In Communist Russia, sideburn burns you!")

This picture has a real facebook feel to it. You know the kind -- you're at a party, maybe a drink or two too deep. You're posing for a picture with people you don't like. You're smiling like a goofball.

I can just hear Obama now. "Silvio -- Don't tag me in this picture, man. Don't do it. I'll totally untag myself."

If the G-20 is as big a party as it appears, I can only hope French first lady Carla Bruni is the drunk girl.

How blonde is too blonde

My favorite of the almost-first daughters (though she might place second to the Gore girls), unemployed blogger Meghan McCain laments about her love life in her latest column for The Daily Beast.

"Of all the things people warned would happen post-election, no one ever said anything about how complicated dating would become," she writes. "Especially if your dad loses the election."

She also writes about finding pro-Obama stuff on the facebook pages of potential dates:

When I see this type of information I immediately start thinking: How liberal is this person? Do they know I am Republican spawn, against everything that this person believed in during the last election? How important is politics to this person? When I find my father’s face staring back at me on a potential date's Facebook page I am equally put off. I don’t want to see my father’s picture near any picture of a guy I am attracted to, especially if we haven’t even had dinner yet.

Suffice it to say, talking politics would be the last thing I'd want to do with Meghan McCain.

Stanford Tree redux

After publicly professing my fanhood, I friended the Standford Tree on facebook, and now I have access to his (her, its?) pictures.

Enjoy yourselves tonight

In a sign of how creepily invasive Facebook has become, there's an application that tracks what people are writing on other people's pages. Search for a word, and you get a graph that shows how often it's appearing by day.

Just for kicks, let's take a look at how often "hangover" appears:


Each weekend, with one big spike tomorrow. Classic.

Swim Fan

While I was looking through pictures for yesterday's wildly successful man-or-woman feature, I came across Australian swimming gold medalist Stephanie Rice, seen at left, who was obviously not fodder for gender bender quiz.

Further study has revealed that in addition to being my type, she and I also have in common a love of costume parties and bowling.

I know this from these photos, which were taken off her once-public but now-private Facebook page.

We have moved to Scrabulous Threat Condition Red

I've been joking for some time that if Facebook ever got rid of Scrabulous, the unauthorized Scrabble knock-off, I'd probably stop using the site altogether. Well, my bluff may have been called.


Scrabulous is down, just a week after the makers of the original Scrabble sued the two computer programmers who created the online Scrabulous game.

I don't know if the lawsuit is why the game isn't available this morning, but it seems like a reasonable conclusion.

This is welcome news to Bean Stringfellow and Mrs. N-B, both of whom were about to lose to me. It's bad news for my sister, who was destroying me (again).

QI, XU, et al.

My latest obsession Scrabulous hit the front page of The New York Times this weekend. If you still have the paper floating around your house, take a close look at the graphic and look at the players' names. Or click here.

For the uninitiated, Scrabulous is online Scrabble, which started on this website and really took off after its programmers came up an interface for the Facebook website. My sister and I played game No. 1,061 back last April. The game someone just started with me on Facebook is No. 21,427,617, so it's fair to say it's kind of popular. (I'm just about .500 in my career, if you were wondering.)

The Times story doesn't break any new ground, except to say that there are two game companies that have signed deals with Scrabble-maker Hasbro for official online versions of the game.

The Scrabble people have threatened to shut down Scrabulous because it's unauthorized. I'm sure they'd change their minds if they heard this.

Great -- more competition

You may have heard that Boston Archbishop Cardinal Sean O'Malley is starting his own blog.

You might enjoy reading his dispatches from a trip to Rome, but not as much as you'll enjoy these O'Malley pictures I found on his facebook page.

You can see he likes to tailgate, but is slighty disapproving of drinking from an ice luge.

How Kaavya Viswanathan got wild, got busted, got contrite

You may or may not have heard about the Harvard sophomore who got a $500,000 book deal, then admitted to inadvertently plagiarising parts of her debut novel.

I think her Facebook page (screenshot below) really says all we need to know.