If you read this, it's not you, it's someone else

I signed onto Facebook today, and saw that another friend had joined a group with a name like "1 million people before 9th july 2010 and Facebook will stay free". I'm not sure why this frustrates me so much, but it does. Periodically, I've considered just deleting anyone who does fall for such obvious hoaxes, but I haven't taken the plunge yet. I probably shouldn't be judging Facebook friend worthiness by intellect, but it's hard not to.

Seriously, if Facebook was dumb enough to start charging, it would be a blessing, because I'd finally just leave instead of going through the daily, "Should I stay on Facebook and risk having them steal my soul through my keyboard? Oh, but if I don't stay I won't be able to receive pixilated Farmville gifts or know who's suddenly single and probably didn't want it to be broadcast to all their random childhood friends and people they met at parties but somehow hasn't figured out the importance of checking their profile and privacy settings. No soul, but Farmville; soul, but no Farmville. Why must life face me with such horrible decisions?" The whole internal dialogue isn't so bad, but the part where I curl up on the floor in the fetal position for 20 minutes wailing has been seriously cutting into my day.

But, it's irrelevant, Facebook is not giving me that gift any time soon, because charging for Facebook would immediately eliminate the major draw of Facebook: That everyone is there. They charge, people leave, then they have to rename it, "Face-of-people-who-are-stupid-enough-to-pay-for-facebook-while-everyone-else-goes-to-one-of-the-million-free-imitation-sites-that-appeared-the-minute-facebook-started-charging-book". That would be hard to turn into an easily recognizable logo.

There's also no chance that Facebook is giving up on its dream to merge us into a giant cyborg to destroy the world. It begins with pages, it ends with the giant cyborg attacking all the world leaders, except that since they all got on the Facebook bandwagon already, it's really just punching itself in the gut. Why? Because cyborgs always seem like a good idea when you live in a dorm room, and it's hard to let such dreams go when you leave the dorm room with the capability to produce one. And a giant cyborg made up of everyone in the world doing the Macarena would probably be pretty hilarious. Anyways, why would Facebook start charging and risk that Twitter will beat them to it with their giant, noisy bird cyborg? That's right, they wouldn't, because that bird would be pretty annoying.

Speaking of Twitter, I was bored today and thought that maybe I should start trying to tweet again. I'd set up an account the day I started this very blog, but realized that character limits make me actually need to consider what's relevant to my reader, which is a lot of work. I'd rather just rant, limitless and let you carefully dig through it to find glimpses of sanity. So, my only tweet, until today, was, "I can't tweet. Read my blog."

But, I've learned recently that most of my friends are likely illiterate (except for you, whoever you are...you are one of my smart friends. Congratulations!). Well, illiterate or polite, because they keep on telling me that they want to read my blog, they just don't have the time. So, I thought, maybe I'll tweet as well, for all my slow friends (Again, that's not you, because you made it here. You probably shouldn't mention this to the slower ones though. No, I won't give you money to hide it. What kind of person do you think I am? Okay, you're right, you probably know what kind of person I am, because you actually read this blog, and I've dangerously forthright. Please, just let it go so I can end this horribly long fictional conversation. Thank you. Finally.)

The point is, today I returned to Twitter to tweet this "I'm going to try tweeting again, because apparently most people I know don't have the attention span to go past 140 characters." You probably noted that I didn't use the word illiterate, because that might offend them. It's okay here though, because, as I mentioned, they'll never make it this far. And even if they do, they'll probably just furrow their caveman brows in confusion as they try to figure out the long word starting in "i". Then they'll probably go all Space Odyssey 2001 on their computer. Then the baby in space will freak me out and I'll know what it feels like to be them, and I'll feel bad about calling them illiterate, because the confusion sucks.