The Apocalypse, or How To Waste More Time On Facebook
So you thought checking away messages and buddy info on AOL Instant Messenger was a complete waste of your time?
So you thought stalking the profiles of people who you want to make out with on Facebook was a complete waste of time?
Forget, for a second, gentle readers, how many hours you’ve wasted away doing both of these things. Forget those effervescent seconds you’ve whittled away from your life while playing Scrabulous. Think for a second about how much more time you’d waste on the infernal site if those two things were to merge. It’d be exponential.
It’s an apocalypse-waiting-to-happen.
And that’s just what is happening, starting this month, with Facebook’s new Chat service, which will allow you to chat with your friends who are online within your browser, for an entirely new, self-destructive level of procrastination. I expect to see people stop eating and start strapping their laptops to their chests when this thing breaks. You won’t even need a cell phone pretty soon; you can already leave video messages on people’s walls, talk with people in real time, and it just seems inevitable that you’ll soon be able to video chat through the social networking site. And never leave your house.
Facebook says (like it always does) that you’ll have complete control over everything. I don’t buy that for one second; there’s no way they can control a nuclear holocaust caused by the complete death of real socializing.
Conversations are one-to-one, completely private, and only between Facebook friends. The message history is saved from page to page, and even between login sessions, but it is not logged permanently. Should you wish to clear out the history immediately, there’s a link provided in each conversation to do so. If you don’t want your Mini-Feed stories embedded into your conversations, you can turn off that feature from either the Mini-Feed privacy page or the Chat settings panel. As Chat grows and evolves, we’ll continue to make sure that you are in control.
I’ll believe that when I see it. In the meantime, I’ll be stocking up canned food, flashlight batteries, and a real Scrabble board in my bunker out back. I’ll see you when the dust settles.
Feed for College Ave.