My Mood Is Litigious. Mathew Firsht was awarded 22,000 pounds after suing former school chum Grant Raphael, who had created a bogus Facebook profile of Firsht listing his location, activities and lying about his politics and sexual orientation as well as a profile of his company titled "Has Mathew Firsht lied to you?" The two men were at one point business partners, and according to the judge who presided over the civil case, Raphael was bitter and envious of Firsht's success. The BBC quotes media lawyer Jo Sanders: "Sat at home or school or in the office, it's easy to think of social networking sites as harmless fun, that it's like chatting with friends, and that things posted there are either a joke or just a mischievous way of causing embarrassment. This ruling puts an end to that."

Clearly Raphael had low motives and he really was his own worst enemy — Firsht would have accepted an apology and the removal of the profiles, but Raphael was defiant and decided to try his luck in Britain's notorious libel courts. However, the case raises the question of how social networking sites have failed to self-regulate. Even Blogger has "terms of use" that are routinely violated whenever someone posts another person's home address and incites violence against him. Why couldn't Firsht, having spotted his effigy, simply ask Facebook to yank the page by offering the easy proof that it wasn't his own?

Touchy Terrorists. David T at the popular British blog Harry's Place was threatened with a libel suit recently by Mohammad Sawalha, a man the BBC has identified as the mastermind behind "much of Hamas’ political and military strategy." Sawalha heads a Hamas front organization known as the British Muslim Initiative and was gravely offended when David posted a translated Al Jazeera script of a speech Sawalha had given at an anti-Israel rally in Trafalgar Square. In the original version, Sawalha referred in Arabic to "Jewish evil." But then he must have realized that was no way to dupe multiculturalists in London, and asked an obliging Al Jazeera to alter its record and reprint the term "Jewish Lobby." (HP posted the Google cached page of the relevant Al Jazeera website, so there was really no arguing with its evidence).

Once Sawalha got lawyers involved, the blogosphere retaliated — I believe "blogburst" is the technical term — with a massive show of solidarity with Harry's Place. Again, this proved the so-called "Streisand effect": If you sue people on the Internet, you draw more attention to yourself than you would by keeping quiet. And after all, was it really going to do more harm to an agent of Hamas to be thought of as anti-Semitic?

(This wasn't the first time David T has had subpoenas sent to him for something he posted at HP. Then, as now, the would-be litigant's measures backfired.)

The Lawyer, the Book, and the WIPO. Libel isn't the only preserve for the web's pettifogging game wardens. Copyright is, too. An 11-year-old Scottish boy, Comrie Saville-Smith, was sued by the estate of C.S. Lewis after his father gave him the present of a Narnia-themed website — www.narnia.mobi — and guess who had jurisdiction? The U.N. Its World Intellectual Property Organisation, which grunge anarchists in Seattle would hurl rocks at if they took their lazy asses to Geneva, decided that the young Comrie might use the site for commercial purposes and recoup ad revenue on the Lewis brand just as Prince Caspian was hitting international theatres. The Saville-Smiths weren't fined any financial damages (save, I guess, the cost of counsel), but they did have to give up the URL.

The case became a wee cause celebre in Scotland, and you'll never guess which Manichean novel series was invoked to distinguish the big bad literary estate from the devoted but plagued innocent. Feel even sorrier for Comrie. His mom goes around talking like this: "We put up a spirited fight because we wanted to prove that you do not have to hand something over just because someone richer and more powerful tells you to do so."

Sunday, July 20, 2008
Dante's Inferno

so it took 5 years YES to get all 29 amexes sorted through and an absolute time line, so WHAT?
have YOU ever willingly ever had 29 amexes? NO! me neither. and when you see a passing "Guitar Center" charge on an amex if your a musician do you double check it? NO! so i had to got o my production manager as that year was especially horrific, and we made a time line, you have NO idea what that few years was like for us, and you'll all get it soon, as its just a terrible descent into Dante's Inferno and because i simply do not suspect evil in people, so if some loser is making two albums unlikely as it seems at once and there's charges for entire outboard gear , fabulous dinners while i scrounged to feed my child - well sorry but I'm fucking PISSED, that's that. Ive tried to "communicate" but am i really supposed to call or write or have a lawyer call or write the former "Business Manager" who applied for the 74 Visas and 29 amexes and enabled all this insanity and say "oh out of the XX,XXXXX you stole would you mind paying for some suck ass indie album"
how does one do that?
i had a very heavy evening but since we are becoming terrifyingly great, I'm happy to oblige you Gawker people for about oh one more millisecond.
Otherwise we are amazing and I'm listening to Lanegan in the wee hours very loud, and he as always is so underrated and so fucking evocative and an American Treasure, and i wonder what hes up to. not an indie record which sucks, not anything he does.
NOT TRYING TO BE DYLAN!
just trying and succeeding i hope you'll agree at finding my voice
its alright ma, im only bleeding
Corkaroonie [Courtney's page]

Did she just quote Alice in Chains Faith No More [Just had a sec to check my old cassettes—Ian] in that last line there? I don't know about you, but I'm starting to think she's pretty dreamy.

He wasn't cancelled because the topic was no longer of interest — his op-ed coauthor still got to go on air — but because suddenly there was only room for one person.

This could be because Savage is a lefty, and lefties are detested on Fox, but after seeing the segment, I'm going with Radar's theory that the co-author, Maureen O'Connor, was selected for being kind of hot. Fox tends to know its audience like that.

The Girls Gone Wild footage chosen to accompany the on-air chat (above) would tend to reinforce that notion. In any case, a look at Savage's Facebook profile is below.

[Radar]

(Video via RedLasso, Facebook image via Huffington Post)

Gunningham, at far left, in back:

Gunningham, second from left, middle row:

Gunningham, back row, second from left (?):

The self-description:

And perhaps even more incriminating than his friends list:

[TimesPeople]

Menswear designer Thom Browne, a quiet and elegant man by all accounts, says (with an eye roll, apparently): "I don't have a Facebook page. I have no interest in people knowing my personal life." Noble! Though we may know one small detail about Browne, despite his efforts. Reportedly, like Jacobs, he's had his own younger (lots younger) fella in the past, a Columbia University dreamboat who was a springy 19-years-old to his 42. Though, Browne wouldn't necessarily recognize the parallel: "I have no idea what's going on with Marc Jacobs," he says. "I hope he's having a good time." Heh. Oh, he is.

Another geigh fashionmaker, Michael Bastian, uses Jacobs as a model of what not to do: "Well, I don't have a Facebook account for that exact reason!" he crows. But, he does concede that there is a kind of attendant notoriety that comes with Jacobs' level of success. "But you also don't have a choice at a certain point," he says. "When you become such a superstar like that—I'm nowhere near that—that's part of the price that you pay. Either you don't give a shit and you roll with it, or you don't live your life." Yet another 'mo, Liz Claiborne designer John Bartlett, was scared away from the public eye years ago and has no intention of returning. After reading about a difficult breakup in Page Six, an experience he found "horrifying," he is now happily and quietly "married." Oh, good.

So these boys just don't need the damn Facebook and are perhaps better off for it. Maybe when the inevitable Robot Wars come and we're all forced to sign up for Facebook as some sort of government conscription initiative, those three can just leave the relationship status space blank or something.

Menswear Designers Roll Eyes at Marc Jacobs' Facebook Exploits [NYO]

I can picture the sorts of classmates I had who would still use the magazine to keep up to date: the sad, provincial ones. They haven't found a closer group of friends in post-college life, because they got married early and settled down and only have a few family friends. Of course, even in this group I expect everyone's found church friends and soon they'll meet their fellow young parents at their kids' preschool. They have someone new to share their life with, and when the second baby comes they won't think to send a photo into the alumni mag.

But it's not just Facebook that replaces the magazine. I just don't get why anyone would still update their college friends through a magazine in a world of e-mail and photo sharing. A magazine is a bizarre place to share your personal story with people you already know (and I don't even want to know the people who specifically want to share their baby photo with everyone who's ever been associated with their school). I never talked to my classmates through the school paper (even when I edited it, heh), so why would I do so now? Any modern online version of the magazine would still be the same one-to-many-to-one medium, and only the least interesting members of my college community would still want to interact with it that way.

So what's left for the alumni magazine? Is there any hope of relevance? Whatever the Times offers, I say no!

According to the London Times, "guests" took $12,000 of jewelry and clothes before cops broke up the party a bit after midnight.

In the invitation, host Jodie Hudson said "Theres gone be a lot of alcohol an amazing DJ." A search for that phrase gives me nothing on Facebook or Bebo (a larger international social networking site), so we still need to find a copy of the invitation that started it all.

Businesses are also increasingly concerned about the risks posed by blogging, social networking sites, and instant messaging. Approximately 21 percent of the companies surveyed have investigated leaks that occurred through blogs and message boards, and 12 percent investigated leaks that occurred through social networking sites. Other emerging leak vectors include peer-to-peer file-sharing services and multimedia sharing sites like YouTube.

Corporate leakers: remember that everything you do on your work computer is subject to spying. But none of this should be construed as discouragement from leaking to us. Use your personal email account, or your home computer, or even your phone! There is no "NEUWS" without "U."

[ars technica via Jossip; image via Current]

"If anyone has any clues to who would do this, some of the messages were quite personal, and therefore seems to narrow the prankster down to someone who knows me. If you weren't effected please disregard this message."

Oh no! Poor sad Jim McGreevey. At least he has adorable puppies to cheer him up.

1. Mark and Eduardo made Facebook to get into a private Harvard club.

2. Before Facebook, they made a program called "FaceSmash."
(While this has been reported before, the story didn't mention Eduardo or the all-girl nature of the program.)

3. In high school, Mark got on an FBI list for accidentally hacking into a government site.

4. Mark and Eduardo lived a wild life, "dined with royalty" and "ate koala on the yacht of the CEO of Sun Microsystems."

5. Facebook was supposed to IPO this fall.
(Facebook has denied it will IPO this year, and to go public this fall they would have had to register by now.)

There are also some dubious claims:

Many facts seem off. While Sun co-founder Bill Joy has a famous eco-friendly yacht, any yacht owned by former CEO Scott McNealy or current CEO Jonathan Schwartz hasn't been mentioned in the news. Ten million users in two months is ludicrous; the site didn't spread virally from zero to nationwide but was launched by Zuckerberg for Harvard only, then to Ivy League schools, then to select colleges and eventually to all schools, companies, and finally the public.

Saverin has obviously told the story in a self-serving light, and Mezrich has indulged him because it makes a good narrative. Meanwhile Zuckerberg has sued Saverin, claiming "Saverin tried to hijack the company by freezing its bank account when Facebook desperately needed cash in its formative months," according to the magazine 02138. Saverin has counter-sued for a return on his initial investment. Because those billion-dollar figures Mezrich quotes are just predictions until the company actually sells.

1. Who the hell are you again?
Who is Dirk Funk from Germany? Good thing Facebook tells me we have no friends in common so I can reject him right away. Of course, if you're worthwhile to talk to I hope you're not trying to meet people through Facebook but are actually e-mailing or IMing them or maybe going to a goddamn party. But on the off chance that you know I should meet you and yet you choose to use Facebook to do so, use that messaging feature and tell me who you are because I'm not clicking your sorry-ass profile photo.

2. Deal with rejection.
Many of us (including Gawker founder Nick Denton) are so loath to reject some people that we leave them unresolved on our invitations page. I usually clear out my invitations when I'm drunk; it makes it easier to hit "Ignore."

So please remember whom you asked to friend you, and if they don't reply, don't invite them again. So far I've had about eight people add me again after I rejected them, and in that time I never had an actual conversation with them, not even on IM.

3. Don't slobber all over me.
Just one social network at a time, thanks; unless we really got off when we met (and we have met before Facebook right?) I don't want to be your Flickr buddy and Facebook friend and LiveJournal follower all at once. Don't fill my wall with YouTube clips. Just chill and play it slow.

4. Don't unfriend me after an argument.
"The 'people you should know' list on Facebook," said blogger Rex Sorgatz, "is actually a list of people you hate." Try it, it's true! But it's also a great way to see who just de-friended you. After an argument at a party, my friend Ryan decided I did not deserve to write on his Funwall. Of course because he and I share all the same friends, as soon as he de-friended me he popped up on my "people you may know" list. Classy! Now instead of a disagreement we could resolve, we have an awkward official end to the friendship.

Same goes for relationships; wouldn't it be decent of you to tell your close friends first about your breakup, and not 300 acquaintances?

5. Don't worry about it.
[Gawker story removed because god let's not go into it]
Don't bring Facebook into the real world. Unless your girlfriend dumps you through Facebook status, which violates rules #6-11.

For each time you did the following in the last thirty days:

1 point

• Asked for a digg
• Added someone on Facebook the day you met them
• Visited MySpace
• IMed someone asking who they are
• Messaged someone on a site like Facebook when you could have called or e-mailed
• Used a "Sent from my Blackberry/iPhone/etc." e-mail signature
• Discussed an Apple rumor
• Made a joke about fonts

2 points

• Commented on a blog just to say you liked or hated something
• Posted a Craigslist missed connection
• Used MySpace
• Submitted your own blog post to Digg
• Asked someone to blog you
• Added to a Wikipedia talk page
• Bought a Threadless T-shirt

3 points

• Told a personal story in a Yelp review
• Used Tumblr
• Gave a bad review on Amazon to a book written over thirty years ago
• Added a celebrity on Facebook
• Made a YouTube response video
• Twittered about your blog
• Got fake-married on Facebook
• Friended someone on MySpace, LinkedIn, Friendster, or Yahoo 360
• Asked anyone to tag anything

4 points

• Invited someone to add their photo to a Flickr group
• Invited someone to a Facebook app
• Vlogged
• Made a Facebook event that wasn't really an event
• Blogged about dealing with someone in the service industry
• E-mailed a press release
• Wrote "why do I care" in a blog comment

Death Round: 20 points

• Sent an unneeded "reply to all"
• Sold someone's contact info
• Played Second Life
• Rickrolled someone
• Reviewed your own book on Amazon
• Complained that someone reblogged a third party's content without crediting you for finding it first
• Said the word "microcelebrity"
• Invited your whole address book to something
• Talked like a LOLcat in real life

Results
0-10: Get the hell off my blog. But first digg my story.
11-15: You must feel great about yourself. Add twenty points for taking the quiz.
16-25: Very mediocre. Why are you reading this on your Playstation? Go play GTA IV.
26-40: All your Tumblr posts are stolen from other people's blogs. Your Twitters are about Twitter. But somehow all the YouTube clips you IM me are two years old.
41+: All my base are belong to you. Oh god, you probably laughed at that. You can haz the finger, jackass.

Picture: A very funny College Humor article. Before you go, I was serious about the digg.

To whom it may concern:

If you used Facebook's search bar feature yesterday and were able to see your "top 5" friends, then there will be a PHP file containing the "o" ranking of every single one of your Facebook friends stored somewhere on your computer.

Please note: this tip applies to anyone whose computer saves temporary internet files.

(1) Open your "Temporary Internet Files" folder. (For example, from Internet Explorer, go to Tools > Internet Options > Settings > View Files.)

(2) Within the folder, look for files last accessed on May 13 around the time you first tested out the Facebook search bar function.

(3) You should be able to find a PHP file called "typeahead_search."

(4) Save this file to another folder and open it with a text editor like Notepad (or the Mac equivalent). You will see that the file contains script for every single one of your friends. (See the script here for an example.). If you search within the file for the name of any of your Facebook friends, you will find their ranking after the letter "o." The five people with the lowest "o" rankings will be the same as your "Facebook 5."

It was part of the autocomplete for the search box. The file the server sent when you clicked on the search box was a big list of Friends and groups (that it used to autocomplete when you type) like this:

{"t":"[Dude's Name]","i":2401357,"u":"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/profile.php

?id=2401357","o":216,"it":"","n":"Northwestern"}

for me the "o:" value here is 216 for the vast majority of the names,
216 being my total number of friends, but some are lower - lo and
behold people with 0-4 are the five people that show up in the search
box

o's just a ranking thing, like so when you type "a" it uses the o
value to figure out which names should come first, then everything
that's 216 is just in alphabetical order

The only thing that remains is how they computed the o values, I
assume the method was something nefarious. Anyway it's gone now, but I
hope this helps. I'm not affiliated with facebook or anything.

• The "It's People YOU Search For" Theory
  A passionate reader writes: "jesus.... PLEASE correct that facebook post. it's the five people whom YOU SEARCH FOR most often... not the other way around. it's driving me crazy reading through all the comments seeing people getting mad at facebook for absolutely no reason."
• The "It's A Coding Error" Theory
  From a Facebook discussion thread: "I suspect it's meant to be the people whose profiles you look at the most, but that they're referring to the wrong statistics (human coding error) and it's actually the 5 who look at yours most. I think it's a mistake because Facebook wouldn't do something like that deliberately, it goes against their ethos of anonymous browsing, but it definitely refers to a statistic that they're keeping, and between the [limited] information that the coding context gives and the nature of the names (after cross-referencing with 7 of my friends), I'd say they're accidentally calling up the 5 people who browse you the most."
• The "Search Frequency" Theory
  A reader attempts to parse the Facebook algorithm: "I have a theory. I think it's matching the frequency of times that you search for someone with the frequency of times that people search for you and it's an attempt at interpreting who your best friends are."
• The "It's NOT The People You Search For" Theory
  A commenter tries the process of elimination: "eek — okay so i went on my secret stalking-only facebook page, where i have no friends, and tried it. nothing came up, which makes sense, cause it's a whack name. however, the people i use it to stalk didn't show up either, which means it cannot be tracking the people we stalk."
• The "Facebook Says You Like These People" Theory
  A commenter claims to go directly to the source: "OK, my friend emailed her friend that works for the Good Book and here was the response (emphasis mine): This is the canned response we've been using:
  The five friends that you see below the search box are populated based on people whom we think you'd be most interested in. Taking into account various factors, we attempt to make an educated guess as to who it is you're looking for when you start typing a name in the search box. Please note that this information is only visible to you and will not be shared with your friends. We hope that this feature is helpful and we appreciate your feedback. Let me know if you have further questions."

[UPDATE: Although the "down arrow" feature seems to have been disabled, you can still pull up the list of five by typing a period (".") in the search box.]

Less than a fortnight ago Mrs Grinhaff, 42, updated her profile on the social networking site, Facebook, telling friends she was "currently splitting" from her husband.

She added: "Been married for 16 years but together for 26!!!! God that makes me sound old."

Some neighbors told the Daily Mail that she was having an affair, but who knows. The one sure thing is that, if she wrote that message on her Facebook page, her husband was sure to find it. Here's her complete list of friends:

[via Daily Mail UK]

Both IM and social networking sites also redefine what it means to keep in touch with friends. College students frequently read friends' away messages on IM to catch up on their activities, rather than picking up the phone or launching an IM conversation. Facebook has been described as "a way of maintaining a friendship without having to make any effort whatsoever," since you can see what your friends are up to simply by viewing their pages. In fact, Facebook will notify you when the birthdays of your online "Friends" roll around, so you can post a birthday greeting on their Facebook "Wall" (think of an electronic notice board). It's Happy Birthday without risk of personal involvement.

Recently I have been studying how university students in Sweden, the US, and Italy use their mobile phones. To understand why young people choose to send a text message (rather than make a voice call), I asked students to evaluate this possible explanation: "I want to make my message short, and talking takes too long."

Like most technologies, computers and mobile phones are mixed blessings. Internal combustion engines brought the convenience of automobiles, but they also pollute the planet. Mobile phones are invaluable for bridging distance, yet they magnify our ability to distance ourselves from others.

Control Freaks [OUPblog]

11. YouTube

At risk: Daredevils, fictional characters
Case 1: While trying to perform a stunt for YouTube, four teens crashed their Ford Explorer, injuring three and killing one. No details on how awesome the clip would have been, but hopefully it'd be more exciting than "ghost riding," the 2005-07 fad of rolling an idling car down the street while dancing beside it. The result of that fad, besides a few lame videos, was two deaths. Other stupid deadly stunts include subway surfing and fake stunts that end up in banner ads.
Case 2: A man who explained on YouTube how to tie a hangman's noose has been accused of inciting suicide. A few days after the news reported it, someone else posted instructions (though this user has posted plenty of other knot-tying videos, and who could hang themselves with the festive purple and yellow rope he uses?).
Case 3: Of course fictional characters die often and violently: Lonelygirl15, Harry Potter, and the radio star.


10. Myspace

At risk: The lonely
Case 1: Remarkably, no charges were filed in the case of the family who carried on a hoax relationship with 13-year-old depression sufferer Megan Meier over MySpace, then "broke up" with her and thus driving her to suicide. But this is only our first glimpse at two themes of Internet-caused deaths: Tragic romance and preying on the lonely.
Case 2: In this case, MySpace technically saved lives. Cops investigated a 12-year-old boy's MySpace death list, warned everyone who was on it, and searched his home. They didn't find weapons and he said he was just fooling around, so he was just charged with juvenile delinquency. Other death threat cases include a dog and another empty threat against high school students. But just to be safe I make my little sister keep a Google alert on her name, cause she''d be the first to go if some trenchcoated freak started shooting up the cool kids in her school.
Case 3: Of course while stupid people may reveal their murder plans on MySpace, they may be inspired by the site too. Heather Kane saw another girl on her boyfriend's profile and hired a hitman to kill her. Good thing she bumped into an undercover cop instead.


9. Facebook

At risk: Anyone who pisses off a muslim
Case 1: A Saudi Arabian father beat and shot his daughter earlier this year for chatting on Facebook. A preacher in the Islamic country called the site a "door to lust;" many Saudi women use aliases on the site and post drawings instead of photos. But there are still plenty of photos of hookups in the Facebook group "Single and Looking in Saudi Arabia."
Case 2: After a Jewish woman in Melbourne rejected a friend offer from one Ibrahim Dirani, he allegedly wrote to her, "I am Hezbollah and I am going to kill you and all of your family — promise you."
Aw,


8. Pornography

At risk: Viewers of extreme or illegal porn and the people who know them
Case 1: It's hard to feel too sorry for those who kill themselves after they're implicated in child porn rings, like these four suicides in 1998 and these six in 2004.
Case 2: Porn doesn't only kill the depraved. The story of Jane Longhurst, an English woman killed by "a man obsessed with violent sexual pornography," was tragic enough to encourage many UK lawmakers to ban extreme porn.


7. Spam

At risk: The terribly gullible
Case 1: Spammers and scammers can easily take your money if you're dumb enough to give them your passwords and financial info. But some Nigerian scams go far beyond online fraud; many scammers lure their victims to Nigeria to continue paying money in person; fifteen victims were killed after they got suspicious.


6. Blogging

At risk: Those already at risk of dying
Case 1: There's a trick to making listicles like this: Put the weakest item in the middle. Unfortunately the New York Times spent an entire trend piece on the bogus idea of "death by blogging." But Gizmodo editor Brian Lam tells me, "Only bogus to lazy bloggers. I did 75 hours this week and anyone over fifty would die doing that."


5. Ebay

At risk: The already dead
Case 1: Seung-Hui Cho bought empty clips and holsters on Ebay before his Virginia Tech rampage. He got his guns and ammo elsewhere, though Ebay notes that the sale of ammunition on Ebay is legal.
Case 2: Ebay's death profits tend to come from the memorabilia. Celebrity deaths bring predictable results, like sales of Pope tchotchkes and autographed Heath Ledger posters. But Ebay has also hosted auctions for supposed Columbia shuttle pieces, video of insurgents shooting down planes in Iraq, the car used in a murder, and O.J. Simpson's book.


4. Drugs

At risk: Druggies
Case 1: Internet drug sales are ridiculously easy (see "spam" above), so easy that every decent men's magazine did an "I ordered Viagra off the Internet" story by 2005. But that means irresponsible doctors can prescribe dangerous drugs, such as this 2002 case of deadly drugs sold online, or this case of a doctor whose patients sometimes became addicted or were hospitalized, or a 2007 case where a 57-year-old Canadian woman died after taking an illegal sedative she ordered online.


3. Webcams

At risk: Suicides
Case 1: Webcam suicide is one of the darkest modern phenomena, an example of loneliness and despair in a supposed age of connection and hope. Those who have fallen that far and recovered may want to forget it ever happened. Webcammer Stacy Pershall has long insisted that despite reports, she did not try to kill herself on camera in 2001 by overdosing on pills but merely took some Advil "to get a few hours sleep" — on her bathroom floor.
Case 2: While Pershall's viewers worried about her and called the cops to save her, those watching Brandon Vedas in 2003 egged him on. He OD'd on five drugs and died a room away from his unsuspecting mother.
Case 3: A father named Kevin Whitrick hanged himself after the apparent encouragement of people watching his webcam; viewers later said they thought it was a joke, and indeed they'd acted worried after seeing him die. After all, he was in an insult chat room, which brings us to another cause of death:


2. Chat rooms

At risk: Hopeless romantics
Case 1: A man rejected in real life by his chat room lover in 1999 cut his own head off with a chainsaw in her front yard. Enough said.
Case 2: Plenty of innocents have been killed by online predators like the man who killed an altar girl, the Texas A&M killer, and this guy in a rural North Carolina trailer.


1. World of Warcraft

At risk: 10 million players, particularly the already crazy ones
Case 1: World of Warcraft addiction may not necessarily be deadly for the player, but it can be hell on their family life. Of course, Kim Trenor was probably crazy long before she moved cross-country with her 2-year-old to see a guy she met on the game, and definitely before she and Royce Zeigler beat "Baby Grace" to death. But if it weren't for that damned game she never would have met the allegedly abusive Zeigler.
Case 2: WoW isn't the first game to drive addicts mad. At least one Everquest player allegedly shot herself after getting hooked on the game.
Case 3: And of course any time you put a beautiful bit of fantasy in the world, some kid will try to imitate it. Happened with Superman, happened with WoW when a Chinese boy jumped off a 24-story building. His parents sued game maker Blizzard saying he was imitating the game, in which some players like to platform-jump, an activity totally unrelated to actually playing. Again, totally not WoW's fault, but something had to convince that boy he could leap off a tower.

I have around four hundred Facebook friends and about four real life friends. Half of my Facebook friends are people I added in a drunken stupor; the other half added me in a drunken stupor. While I might want to look at the "Random Pics" of someone from high school, I certainly do not want to instant message with that person about their "craziest birthday ever." When you sign on to Facebook chat, there's no buddy list. Since all your Facebook friends are theoretically your real friends, everyone comes up. And every time I sign in, the meaninglessness of Facebook friendship becomes more apparent.

The other problem is that to use Facebook chat, you have to admit to using Facebook. And being into Facebook is lame. For as much pleasure Facebook gives me, I know looking at pictures of strangers and creating pithy status updates is not a good use of my time. Plus, having people see you online takes away from the voyeuristic pleasure of Facebook. No onlooker wants to be watched.

But the biggest drawback to Facebook is chat that I don't need it. I can't have three windows dedicated to LOL'ing with friends. Some of us have work to do, even if that work is writing about goofy internet trends.