The Social Network

If you haven’t been asleep for the past 5 years, you’ve probably noticed the rise of the “Social Networking” website. These oddly popular networks have achieved an impressive amount of influence across the web.

Do you ever just find yourself lamenting that there are 24 hours in the day? It gets even worse when you start counting seconds; we did.. there are 86,400 of them! How are you going to spend all of that time avoiding personal responsibilities and meaningful personal introspection? Luckily, social networks are here! You can wile away the hours online with people just like you, and avoid the difficulty of talking to anyone face to face.

Of course the true value these sites offer is letting everyone know just how popular you are. Social networks let you collect and display friends who don’t have to know you, like you, or have even met you! Don’t have any friends? Don’t worry… go through the effort of gaining a few through traditional means (or create fake accounts for people) and add them as your friends. Like a beggar who seeds his styrofoam cup with a few coins to say to all the passersby, “Look at these coins, others didn’t find me offensive!”

The crazy thing is, social networking sites seem to be astronomically valued in the marketplace. I mean over-valued like reality television or Enron stock. One particular social networking site, which shall remain nameless, has recently been pegged at 15 billion dollars! With roughly 70 million users, that puts a value of about $200 per user. WTF?!

Even though social networks appear to have saturated the market, we’ve found a demographic area that they’ve completely neglected: anti-social people. We’re not referring to people who spend their days being productive and interacting in the real world, we’re referring to people who genuinely don’t like each other and want to express it. In our experience, it’s easy to keep track of people we genuinely like, but hard to keep track of everyone we don’t like. Not to mention that it seems our list of enemies seems to grow much faster than our list of friends. So we’ve come up with a solution:

farcebook

farcebook is an anti-social network for people looking to keep track of their enemies, remind their enemies that they’re still out there, and to generally annoy their “friends.” It has many features that you’d expect in a modern web application. We’ve whipped up this bad boy in just a handful of hours and can’t wait until we get our share of that $15 billion!

Features

Messaging

While most people will consider messaging to be email by just a different name, we can’t help but point out that you can’t check your email from our website.

Profiles

Want to be followed by some online-admirers offline? Leave your full name, telephone number, address, daily schedule, and list of your greatest fears in your profile.

Innovation

farcebook isn’t only about copying other features though. We’ve taken existing ideas and tweaked them just enough to call them innovative.

Foes

When you lose track of your friends, it’s no big deal… they don’t send you a christmas card. If you lose track of an enemy, they send you a christmas card, but it’s got anthrax in it. That’s why you need a “foe” list.

Foes are people who you consider enemies. Farcebook lets you keep a running list of the people that you don’t like, which can often get long in this day and age. The big innovation here is that the other person doesn’t have to accept you as their foe. This is an intentional feature to farcebook - we figure that while friendships are usually mutual, hatreds can be entirely unidirectional. For example, there are people in the world right now that hate me because I’m an American. They can hate me in real life without my permission and now they can hate me on farcebook.

Stabs

Do you ever want to get your foe’s attention? Just to let them know that you’re thinking about them? We have too! For this, we came up with the concept of stabs. Stabs remind your foes that you’re still out there, plotting revenge or counting the days until you’re off of probation. Of course, once you’ve been stabbed as a user, you can stab them back. It’s only fair.

High Score List

Social networks seem to ignore the idea of competitiveness amongst users. Of course we’re all trying to have the most number of foes! farcebook puts this list on a page for everyone to see. That way, when you reach the top, you’ll actually have a place to prove your bragging rights.

“Gifts”

The idea of gifts aren’t unique to farcebook, but the kind of gifts we let you give are like the back-handed compliments of gifts. Send someone a punch in the face, or a trojan horse. Go on, accept our gift. Let it inside your ring of trust. Let your kids and pets play with it. Nothing bad will happen. Will it?

Giving it back

At Code Irony, we’re all about doing. So rather than just speculate, we’ve gone ahead and built farcebook. You can visit it here. Also, you can download the source code here. Thanks for reading, and be sure “foe” us on farcebook.

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