In their ongoing effort to turn life into one grand popularity contest, facebook has announced a new service, called “faceball,” which essentially replicates the experience of being picked for sides on a grade school softball match, only on a global scale.
Using advanced algorithms, facebook will automatically analyze your friends, comments, list of likes, as well as taking your profile pictures and comparing them to statistical norms. They will measure your overall physical attractiveness, combining this with the coolness (or lack thereof) of your parents and siblings, and, based on that aggragate data, decide how generically appealing you are. This will be reflected in how early in the process you are picked for one side or the other; that number will represent your overall global social status. By the way, anyone with a number over 500 million is a definite dweeb.
In preparation of the feature's release, many people have already started to “friend” as many distant acquaintances as possible in an attempt to improve their standing and sense of social acceptance. But Bob Ziltgenstein, product director at facebook, told reporters that this will not help. “If you only have five friends,, hey, if they’re really really cool, that’s a lot better than being an obviously desperate ‘friend whore’ to anybody who clicks on ‘confirm’.”
Ziltgenstein also pointed out that in the first version of this, facebook users will not have the option to opt out and will have to submit to this arbitrary superficial judgment of their existence relative to everyone else on the planet.
“After all,” he said, “if a whole lot of losers opted out, that might skew the results, and we don’t want that to happen, at least not at first.” He did go on to say that people at the very bottom of the list would probably “get the hint,” and quit facebook of their own accord, since it would become clear that no one really wants them around. “They probably don’t have any friends anyway,” he said. “And if they do have any friends, those friends are probably losers too.”
© Justin Locke
