Have you stopped recently and thought about 25 extraneous details about yourself that nobody, including your friends and family, would ever be bored enough to care about? Because everyone else is, treating the Facebook version of the chain letter as if it's some brilliant social analyzing tool. But are these memes* just minor time wasters? Or are they evident of something much more sinister and stupid in Mark Zuckerberg's networking site?

The problem with MySpace came up abruptly, when within days into 2006 it suddenly seemed like everyone's account was hacked and spambots took control. Overnight, users stopped trusting messages from their "friends" telling them to click a video for something really cool, because it often led to their own accounts being hacked and spamming their friends' walls. Hilariously-named blogger Kevin Douch summed up the current MySpace music climate nicely:

How many music fans still have a Myspace account and actively engage with artists through it? Perhaps it's just the BSM profile, but I can't see anyone through the crowds of spam robots, crap music and girls trying to flash their tits.

Circle of life, hakuna matata, we all moved on from MySpace. What contributed to this downward death spiral of corporate spamming? "Personalized" spam, just like these memes currently cropping up on Facebook, which is passed around faster than HPV in a freshman dorm.

25 Things About Yourself

But before the spam there were forwarded time-wasters, the most famous of which was the seemingly innocuous "Here is some random information about me" form. They were fun to fill out, and spending a half hour recalling your first kiss and the name of your old dog from high school was a reasonable way to pass time. The problem with these forms of memes is that it takes about two minutes of Internet time before they go from fun to trollage. We've already seen the next steps play out in MySpace: surveys beget trolls, which beget corporate advertisers trying to start some viral shit under the guise of familiarity. 25 Things About the Oscars? Sure, why the hell not. Lets give it another week before we start seeing these passed around for Coca-Cola or some local crappy club promoter.

Create Your Own Record Album

Here's how you do it:

1.) Go to “wikipedia.” Hit “random” or click
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.
2.) Go to “Random quotations”
or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.
3.) Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days” or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
4.) Use photoshop or similar to put it all together.

You'd think people would have learned by now to stop putting shit on Facebook (or any other networking site) that they didn't want found by future employers. Yet for some reason my little sister still loves to get high and leave video recordings on my wall. Go figure. The "Create Your Own Record" chain reminds me of my sister's good-natured but ultimately naive and borderline stupid habit: Don't bling out you or your friends' profiles in stupid crap that someone important might end up seeing. It devalues not only your future prospects, but the networking site itself, as these forwards become further evidence that no one is using Facebook as anything other than a time-drainer and ubiquitous self-promotion anymore. Sure, that may have always been the case, but at least Zuckerberg's concept originally tried to be a little more upscale.

"Peeps"

People want to feel important and recognized, and there is no quicker way to do that then to tag their picture on Facebook. Low and behold, when you click on the link it's not your own face staring back, but a chart of these Schoolhouse Rocks-y cartoons with titles like "The Jock" or "The One that Always Swears." Admittedly this fills the same hole in our heart that getting superlatives in the high school yearbook did, but ultimately it undermines the idea that Facebook is somehow going to be different or better than MySpace or Friendster. Even though the connection between how soon after these silly chains start arriving and when the spam takes over is tenuous, we've seen it happen too many times before not to recognize a connection. Dignity, people!

(If that word still confuses you here is a good crash course)