Off yer Face (book)

"I've been flat out all morning," protested a Fellow Science Professional (female). "I've been sooooo busy I've only been able to check Facebook twice. Seriously."

So apparently, for those who came in late, there's this thing called Facebook. It is, allegedly, the shit. It's this month's MySpace (which presumably makes it this year's Blogger, or this decade's MSN Messenger, or so on.) You put your profile up and people you may or may not know send you superficial greetings and/or exploding sheep. Remind me again why I desperately need to be part of this latest online social revolution?

Facebookers (though some prefer Facenovelists) protest that, tweenie superficiality aside, it's really just a great way of keeping in touch with long-standing mates who've gone O/S and even tracking down old school friends. Thing is, I know where all my old school friends are. They're all at my house on Boxing Day scarfing burnt sausages, swilling the Old Man's superbly neurotoxic home brew and unmercifully sledging the Channel Nine commentary team. I know the day will end up with drunken backyard cricket involving taped-up tennis balls and one-hand one-bounce (beer-in-other-hand essential), and that the Captain will turn up about seven hours after kickoff, even if we forget to call him. (Only about 130 sleeps to go folks.) The rest of the class of '95 I can comfortably do without; you were all lovely people, but if all we have in common is surviving our physics teacher Wally Cameron's bioterrorist halitosis, we ain't got much.

But that, really, brings us to the underlying raison d'etre behind Facebook. If the point of Blogger is to have a medium for one's ill-considered shite to be spilled uncensoriously forth, and the point of MySpace is to get your unsigned-and-justifiably-so band a massive record deal (or, at the bare minimum, a few more roots), what's the point of Facebook? Well, it was explained to me by Another Scientist (for want of a more accurate descriptor), who declared that I simply had to see her Friendship Wheel. This, at the click of a laptop touchpad, displayed all her Facebook friendy-wendy-contacts as points around the circumference of a multicoloured circle. Grrrreat. But wait, there's more. I was bidden to 'check this out' as, at another mouseclick, spidery lines of interrelatedness were linked between the various individuals, representing how each person knew the other, and resulting in something that looked like a rather pants representation of the Tree of Life. This, I was clearly meant to understand, was Something Really Impressive.

So, the point of Facebook appears to be twofold:
(1) You can count up how many friends you have and use this information to compete with other people, just like you used to in kindergarten, and;
(2) You can represent diagrammatically how each of your friends knows each other. Which is good, because you might forget. Given that you probably introduced the motherfuckers in the first place when drunker than George Best.

Just so I'm clear on this, this is a chick thing, yeah?
(Apologies to Mr Appleby, the only owner-of-cruets I'm aware of who contributes to the Book of Face. Look for the Appleby Channel coming to Foxtel this summer.)

My Friendship Wheel, Tree, Piechart or Spiderweb Weaved On Crack would be surmised as follows. We have as one branch Team Old Skool; we have the Weird-But-Entertaining Sydney Fruit Loops, the Inveterate South East Queensland Pisshounds and the Miscellaneous Kiwis Who Somehow Got Dragged Along For The Ride. One may conceive these as discrete groups, but with isolated inbred relationships between them in places; basically it'd look like a genetic pedigree from Alabama, but presumably with less cousin-shagging. In summary: look, I may be a tad busy on occasion, but I don't need Arsebook to remind me who you people are.

And furthermore, in my day we had REAL exploding sheep. We had Worms, you see. At least until the Combantrin kicked in. Stop scratching it, it'll only get under your fingernails.

The Doctor is OUT.