Facebook Stalker

Heard this recently on the radio about the use of social networking sites: The number one use for such sites are for men to look at women they don't know; and the number two use is for men to look at women they do know. To this the radio hosts said "men then spend their time fantasizing how good their lives would be if the women they do know looked like the women they don't know."

We all have a little bit of stalker in us. I'll admit that I go through pictures or friends lists of people on my friends list. I know people who are so proficient at this art that they can seek out pictures of hot chicks who's a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend, and then figure out where she's at now and what schools she went to just based on cross checking friends lists. Of course all I have to do is look at the pictures and go "oh she's hot" or "meh" or "is that .. a man!?"

But the biggest stalker of all has go to be the overlord itself - facebook. You know that feature that suggests to you people you may know? Well at first I thought it was alright, you know, it suggests people with whom I have friends in common (like my brother! ha!). Occasionally it has its misses, but that's understandable, because after all, no algorithm is perfect. Then it started suggesting to me a bunch of my ex-coworkers from Taiwan, with whom I had no common friends. That's when I started to grow a little wary, but not overly alarmed; I may have entered workplace before.

Then, recently, I've become a little freaked out. Not only was it spewing out people with whom I can't remember sharing a connection in cyberspace, it's picking out people I barely even remember. Case in point: I saw the name of a guy with whom I went to cram school for 2 months. 2 months is not a significant amount of time in my life, and I certainly don't know him well (might have had his name on my msn once...). Then there is the friend of my ex-supervisor at a Taiwanese university lab, for whom I worked less than a month before I got a job that paid me more than a slave gets. I mean, sure, I had exchanged a couple of emails with that guy, but it's really starting to freak me out how uncanny facebook is for suggesting all these friends. I think when I start seeing people from my other extremely short stints (1 week at a company before I bolted), I'm gonna delete my facebook account. It's probably too late to stop the spread of my personal info, but being someone only slightly paranoid, "out of sight, out of mind" works well enough.