A lot of these Facebook examples have focused on bad postings, usually ones that should never have been written in the first place. But there's another kind that I haven't talked about much.



What's wrong with this post? Nothing. Nothing whatsoever. It's informative and has content.

Here are the first two followups. The second was written by me.





What's wrong with these? Again, nothing. The first one is good advice about backing up your goodies, and while my joke wasn't the best in the world, it was at least something.


But now we come to it....








Not one, but three straight zero content followups! It's like they're kind of Internet firemen. They saw a fire (conversation) in progress, and immediately turned the hoses on it to drown it out! Funny.

Petrosianic, did you ask yourself why your friend posted their status update about the water leak? My guess is they were looking for some sympathy, or would at least appreciate some sympathy even if they weren't consciously looking for it. So your joke could be seen as inappropriate, maybe... and the three 'zero content followups' might well have been exactly what your friend needed at that time.

I did consider that (too late), and start to wonder whether I should pull it. But fortunately, the original poster clicked Like to my post, so I guess it went over well. The idea was that people who paint real pictures like being told that their stuff is better than "modern art".

I see your point about sympathy, but if it were me and I was upset about something, I wouldn't want to see everybody else getting upset too. So, if it were me, a sympathetic post would be good, even if it had no real content. But something like "Oh nooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" would make me feel worse. I'd want somebody to tell me it's not that bad, not to tell me that it's even worse than I think.

Conversely, the "Unlike" post seems so detached. Imagine someone face to face telling you in a flat monotone "Oh gee, that is really terrible". It sounds like they don't really caer.

I've been following George Takei (Sulu on Star Trek) on Facebook. He links to some really amusing and/or complete nerd-fest type posters a couple of times a day. He's worth "Liking" just to scroll through some of the pics people have sent him and he's posted. Today he had Angry Birds. Of Prey. (Star Trek + computer game reference).

Yeah, he's had some pretty good stuff. A little too good, maybe. He routinely gets thousands of comments. More than he could ever read.

Here's a fun puzzle. Can you figure out what is happening? Probably want to use the spoilers tag to hide your answers. Once I figured out one, most of the other ones fell into place. Didn't get the last one or fourth one though.

Got them all immediately when I understood what was going on. A clue about the ones you missed: you're not European enough. Probably.

Let me see if I can get the spoiler tag working...

Yep. I still don't know who the last group are and I even looked them up. I should have known the fourth group--they're nails on blackboard to me. Fifth one was easy...I used to struggle through the French books for years till I discovered the library had English versions.

Never mind the users, sounds like Facebook itself has gone off the deep end having trademarked "face" "book" and the letter "F" (what will Sesame St. do?).

Granted this is only a symptom of a bureaucratic system gone berserk, but really? Trademarking common words?

Please tell me that there is more to the story.

In the 80's, TSR Games tried to trademark "Nazi". If only we'd thought of that in 1932.