Tuesday 24 August 2010

Facebook; thing 16

Oh dear, no way of avoiding it I suppose (especially since there's a least one other 'Thing' I'm not going to do). So, I've signed up to Fa*e*oo* under a pseudonym a while ago, solely to see that was being said on a group about the UL. The signing up process was pretty grim, actually. Their process objected to the first name 'I.', saying "The name contains too many periods". It also objected to 'I' ("You must provide your full name"), "IM" ("The name contains too many capital letters") and even "Im" responding with a message which I think means it only likes Anglo-Saxon first names. And, you have to have a first name, so if you're someone like U Thant you've got problems. 'U' is a Burmese honorific, so U Thant's whole name is 'Thant' (or so I've been told).

So no marks to Fa*e*oo* for cultural sensitivity - but why should this be a surprise?

Anyway, I can tick the box, but I'm probably too old to appreciate this. Why for example does every entry on the wall have an icon of the Fa*e*oo* page that added the entry? It looks really quite odd.



Though the screen shot above probably won't do it justice.
PS The 23 things instructions include this:

gender and date of birth but (and I haven't told you this) it doesn't have to be truthful.

Why be so coy? I'm not telling anyone my real date of birth and interestingly Fa*e*oo* have decided to ignore the date of birth I gave them and substitute the date I joined.

No comments:

Post a Comment