Entries Tagged 'Facebook Groups' ↓

Ashley Alexandra Dupre…welcome to the limelight.

This girl is all over the Internet because of her ainvolvement with a high-end prostitution scandal involving the governor of New York Elliott Spitzer. She is not just popular on tabloid sites, this call girl is blowing up on Facebook since the scandal occurred. Not that this comes as any surprise since Facebook mirrors real life in so many ways.

A quick search for her name returns 21 different groups and one “fan” page.

Ashley Alexandra Dupre at one time had a public profile page, but it is now private, no doubt a reaction to all of the positive and negative attention.

I wonder if Ashley Alexandra Dupre is regretting the idea to be so public and forthcoming with her self promotion?

I stumbled across a rather ambitious group today: Six Degrees of Separation - The Experiment. Like the play, the movie and the popular game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, this group’s aim is to prove that everyone is connected via a chain of no more than six people. (Not necessarily related; just connected.)

I’ve seen this in other applications and groups, but in those cases the point is usually to link members to the group’s founder. I’m not clear who this group is linking to. Possibly the celebrity of the day that group members vote on?

The ambitious part is that the admin, Steve Jackson, wants to try to prove connections between every member of Facebook — which means, of course, they’ll all have to join the group. The group already has well over 400,000 members, and more are joining all the time.

For connections of a different kind, you might try getting your friends to adopt you with Human Pets. Not since the hula hoop has there been such a craze. And here of course I am speaking about the craze happening in my apartment, a craze of one.

 Well, no. Actually, there are more than 47,000 users of the Human Pets application, which allows you to present yourself as a pet and to buy other human pets. Though it sounds a little kinky, the developer has done a nice job of explaining his view of the tool as a place where minors are welcome and “mean people will be banned.”

It’s a fun format, with lots of little preferences to choose from. You can pick which animal best suits your personality, select your habitat and choose your mood. You can also take part in auctions to buy other humans as pets, and if you are adopted your owner can “feed” you and “pet” you just like he/she can with his/her (fluff)friends.

And, of course, while left to your own devices you can choose to join one of many, many herds, which are basically Wall pages for whichever group(s) you join. Show your appreciation for other pets in the herd by giving them a thumbs-up.

I just found the Kingdom of Loathing page on Facebook. This is an online game I used to play when I was bored at work back in around 2004 or 2005. It’s a weird, fun little adventure game where you earn meat instead of money and everything is hilarious. Maybe it is uncool to still be plugging KoL? Although I sort of doubt KoL was ever really cool. Anyway, be a fan, support the Loathe, chatter in the forums. Good times.

You can now be a fan of Wikipedia on Facebook.

I enjoy this for a couple of reasons. One, that it’s a match made in heaven, as Wikipedia, being a peer-edited encyclopedia, is to social networking demographics what the Oxford English Dictionary is to, you know, everyone else.

But I also love it because the page is written in first-person:

I’m a multilingual, web-based, free content encyclopedia project. I’m written collaboratively by volunteers like yourself from all around the world. Since my creation in 2001, I have grown rapidly into the largest reference Web site worldwide…My mission is to bring free knowledge to everyone on the planet.

Not only that, but Wikipedia responds to comments in first person: “Thanks for all the kind words. Please help me to grow and invite your friends to join me here on facebook!”

I keep imagining the interview when Wiki hired someone to monitor their Facebook profile.

“You’ll be posing as the public face of Wikipedia,” one interviewer says.

“Our WikiRep,” the other one says.

“Pretending you’re a real person –”

“A WikiPerson,”

“You’ll maintain our Facebook presence –”

“Our WikiFacebookPresence,”

“To the best of your abilities.”

“Your Wikilities.”

The profile has 290 fans and links to Wiki’s fundraiser.

Of course, that’s not all. You can also check out My Wikipedia, an app that allows you to display Wiki entries on your profile. The default is the entry Wiki chooses as its featured article every day, but you can customize it to display whatever you want, including options for picture of the day and “my contributions.”

There are also more than a few groups hardcore Wiki fans can join, including If Wikipedia Says It, It Must Be True; Everything I ever need to know, I can learn on Wikipedia; and the distressingly-named Wikipedia is helping me get through med school! (Please, please, let my doctor not be treating me based on entries written by a thirteen year old from Duluth.)

You can also check out the video “Facebook and Wikipedia’s Lovechild!” on the “Everything I need to know” group, which is an ad for a different site but starts with an amusing little idea about all the social networking sites going out drinking together.

Wiki, of course, returns the favor, with a comprehensive user-created page about Facebook that includes just about everything you need to know. Naturally.

I used to read Jane Magazine a lot. They had this feature where people sent in pictures of themselves and the celebrities they freakishly resembled. Why did I so enjoy this? I have no idea, but as with all my pleasures I sought to replicate it on Facebook.

First I tried Likeness, an application many of my friends have added which for some reason I thought would help me compare myself to celebrities. (You mean Angelina Jolie hates skiing too? Gasp! We’re practically twins!) But it turns out that Likeness just helps me compare my likes and dislikes with my friends’ likes and dislikes (another of those ingroup-defining apps I wrote about before), and that of course is no good to me.

Then I tried FaceDouble Celebrity Look-alike. Aha, I thought, this is obviously the thing I want. Some scanning robot will no doubt compare my picture to its database containing millions of celebrities and determine that I look like some forgotten tennis queen from 1986. It’ll be just like in spy movies!

But once again I was disappointed. This app, while fun, lets you compare your friends to celebrities, or lets you suggest the celebrity you feel you most resemble. Not having a spy movie database with millions of entries — or a subscription to People — I cannot say which tennis queen I most look like, so this app is not for me.

Groups like Celebrity Look-Alike and What celebrity do you look-alike?, though fun, also lack a spy database. Basically, what I am looking for is something that does this work for me, something tailor-made to suit my laziness and complete lack of knowledge surrounding the celebrity world. Does anyone know of an app like this? And if I did find such an application, what practical use would I have for it? These are some questions.

While Facebook is primarily a social networking tool, its uses have expanded to provide other functional services as well. For example, you can use Facebook applications to find things in or near your hometown. Here’s a few I found useful:

Cribot

This is a simple bot that searches Craigslist apartment listings based on search criteria you specify. Rather than obsessively refreshing Craigslist every hour, you can just log into Facebook at the end of each day and see what results the bot has collected for you. Of course, those of us who live in cities where there’s deadly competition for good places might not be able to wait until the end of the day before a listing gets snatched up, but in general this looks like a useful tool.

Local Picks

Local Picks is an app from Trip Advisor. This is what started this post; my dad’s coming to the city to have lunch with me and I was looking for someplace new we could go. Local Picks compiles more than 200,000 user-submitted reviews and recommendations of more than 170,000 restaurants in several different countries.

Action Sports

The developers put it best: “If you snowboard, ski, skateboard, surf, mountain bike, bmx, motocross, or wakeboard, this is the app for you.” This app lets you list the places that you go to play. It also provides handy side stuff like snow reports, videos and ratings.

And, of course, you can always turn to local groups to connect with fellow enthusiasts. For example, if you live in my town, you can check out Gardening in the fog to share tips with other growers on what and when to plant in this climate; The Wine Tasting Group, which offers reviews of local wines; or I Want Things to Do In San Francisco, which offers activities and sight seeing suggestions.

Or go global, if you prefer. Groups such as Support the Monk’s Protest in Burma, Protest against huge student loans interest rate hike, or Pro-Test – Supporting Animal Research offer wider views of what people are up to.

Bryan Person wrote an interesting post a few weeks back about the evolution & growth of Facebook groups.

Bryan starts of by sharing why he is not a part of any of the 28 groups on Facebook:

Most of the Facebook groups show initial reactions, people are enthusiastic and then it drops as people start fading away. Facebook groups, do not have an RSS Feed so you can’t monitor em” up with your feed reader.

Infact Bryan’s own Facebook group hasn’t been spectacular — the New Comm Road Travelers .

Here is Bryan’s call then. He wants to know about a Facebook group that has been successful and is doing well. I think the idea behind this is to contradict the self-notion.

Bryan can be reached at bperson - AT - gmail - COT com.

(Image Credits - Bryan’s Site)