Terence Jason Dorman

As I’m sure all of you are aware, the holiday known as Christmas was celebrated all across the world three days ago (barring time zone confusions). While Christmas started as a religious holiday, it has transformed over the centuries to take on new forms of life and celebration. For some it is still that deeply religious holiday that celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ, while for others it is simply a time of merriment, cheer, and gift-giving. Regardless of it’s meaning to the individual, Christmas is an event that cannot be ignored and has become a mainstay in our social and economic cultures.

I have been a huge fan of Christmas for as long as I can remember. My parents and family always made Christmas a wonderful spectacle and it really stuck with me. From the moment Thanksgiving dinner is over my entire body is stuffed with Christmas spirit. I have so much Christmas spirit that I created my own custom red hoodie that resembles Santa’s outfit, which I only wear between Thanksgiving and Christmas of each year, and I wear it every day. I even go to great lengths to dedicate my car with lights, ornaments, a tree, candy canes, and the like, the spread Christmas cheer as I drive around the neighborhood.

This year, on top of my usual traditions, I decided to bring Facebook into the fold. I woke up on Christmas morning, opened gifts with my family, ate our traditional breakfast, and then sat down the computer with one goal in mind. I decided that on this Christmas I would start a new tradition, one that would see me write “Merry Christmas!” on the wall of each and everyone on of my Facebook friends.

It seems, however, that Facebook is not a fan of that.

Before I continue, I must make it clear that I do not think that Facebook has anything against Christmas. This is (probably) not the case, and I will make no argument that Facebook has any feeling one way or another about Christmas. It just so happens that the information I am about to share with you was revealed to me due to my new Christmas tradition. With that explained, I will continue on with my story.

To accomplish my task in an efficient and speedy manner I created a system in which I would open 20 tabs at once, each tab containing a friend on my friend’s list. I would paste “Merry Christmas!” onto their wall, click post, then move on to the next tab. After the batch of 20 friends is completed I’d open another 20 tabs and continue the process until I wished a “Merry Christmas!” to each of my 203 Facebook friends.

After roughly 80 friends, however, Facebook decided they were mad at me. When I clicked “post” on one friend’s wall a warning message came up that read:

“Warning: Please Slow Down
It looks like you’re using this feature in a way it wasn’t meant to be used. Please slow down, or you could be blocked from using it.”

This warning was accompanied by a captcha that I was required to fill out or the “Merry Christmas!” I had just posted would be removed. Needless to say I completed the captcha and then “slowed down” so that the message came up only a few more times. In the end I wished a “Merry Christmas!” to my 203 friends and nobody seemed to be hurt, and I definitely didn’t seem to piss Facebook off enough as I was not blocked from using that particular feature.

I did realize later, though, that the blocking I almost received would have been extremely frustrating. It would not have been because I Wouldn’t have been able to finish my task at hand, but instead that Facebook would be limiting how much I was allowed to say to however many people I wanted to say it to.

Some of you might be thinking, “Well, Terence, if you just post ‘Merry Christmas!’ on your wall, then everyone will see it in their news feed.” This, however, is not necessarily true. It is possible that some of my friends have particular news feed settings (like I do) and maybe my post wouldn’t pop up on there. It is also possible that some of my friends would not sign on to Facebook for hours or days after I posted on my wall, putting that particular post way down on the bottom of their news feed, likely to never be seen. I also have some friends who have upward of 500 friends on their friends list (I have one friend who is 3 shy of 1,500) and even if they were on their news feeds at the exact moment I posted there still would be a chance that they didn’t see it.

In short, I wanted each and every one of my friends to know that I wished them a Merry Christmas, and posting on their individual walls was the best way to do it. Facebook, however, attempted to deter me from that with captchas and the threat of blocking my use of the wall features. I’m still wondering what magical number or rate of posts I would have had to hit to get myself blocked.

From Facebook’s standpoint, I can understand why they wouldn’t want people using their wall feature that way. Maybe some computer genius out there would find a way to create a program that posts the same thing on each of his/her friends’ walls, opening up new ways of marketing/advertising that most people would hate. I can definitely see why Facebook would want to prevent that. My concern, though, arises from the fact that their effort to prevent something such as this almost prevented me from sharing something with my friends.

To understand my plight I need to explain that I choose my Facebook friends carefully. If you are part of my 203 friends on Facebook, you are someone that has significantly impacted my life. Maybe you’re family. Maybe you’re a girl I had a crush on. Maybe you’re one of the guys from Grasshopper’s. Maybe we went to St. John’s together. Maybe we worked together. Regardless of how I met those 203 people or how often I currently see them, those 203 people are important to me in some way and I want to keep in touch with them. In today’s world Facebook is a pretty solid way to keep in touch with people, so it only makes sense that I use it in that manner.

With that in mind, it becomes clear that these 203 people are people that matter to me. None of them are people I met at a bar, learned their name, and added that night when I got home, never to speak to them again. None of them are people I’ve only had one conversation with. They’re all people that if they called and said, “Hey Terence, want to grab something to eat?” I’d say yes assuming I hadn’t already ate or had prior engagements. If I were to get married, I’d want these 203 people to know. These are people that consider part of my life, no matter how big or small that role is.

I know that some people, if not most, don’t use Facebook in this manner. Many people I know, including members of the 203, have over 500 friends on Facebook. I personally don’t understand it but I’m not them and they aren’t my accounts. These types of people probably post their significant events/information on their wall and expect that the people who need/want to see it will. I just don’t buy into that. If I want someone to know something, I’m going to tell them directly. If its a couple of people, I’ll tag them all in a post or send a message. General wall posts are, for me, either personal musings or simply thoughts that I’m sharing with whoever is willing to read them.

If there is something that I want everybody to know, like the fact that I am thinking of them and wishing them a Merry Christmas, I’m likely to do what I did the other day and attempt to post it on each and every wall of the 203. It bothers me that Facebook tried to prevent that, even if the reasoning behind it is benign. Facebook started as, and continues to be, a social networking site. It is labeled and sold as a way for people to stay in touch with friends and share their lives with one another through pictures, notes, statuses, etc. If that is the case, why was I almost prevented from sharing my favorite holiday with my 203 friends?

I’m sure there are some of you reading this who will think that I am making something of nothing, and in the picture I definitely am. For me, though, my life and friendships are extremely important and I find it odd and intrusive that a website, that is labeled as the leading social networking site, has reasons and means to limit how I conduct those relationships. I understand that it is their site and I am a registered user their under their terms, but why have a system in place that effectively prevents exactly what the site is trying to do? What is the magic number of consecutive posts that I can make? Is that number somehow suggestive of how many “true” friends I’m supposed to have? If so, who are they to decide that?

Random Post Script: My repeated mentions of “the 203″ kept making me think of “The 198″ stories that Marvel did a few years ago after House of M. I don’t think there is any significance to that, but I think it is a funny anecdote.