LMK'S Travels: 02/03/13

It seems that you cannot add too many friends on facebook nor can you "connect" with people as advertised. You cannot make new friends you MUST know every body in your contact list personally face to face. You cannot add a stranger, you cannot add anyone as a friend that you have NOT met in person. This is, of course, ridiculous now isn't it? This is supposed to be a social network, correct? Of course, Facebook can activate and try to add friends for you that you do not know or have anything in common with. But you cannot add someone that you have never met yourself. Oh, and don't add your android phone to your account, apparently this is also frowned upon and considered a "different login" place. Keep reading what you read may change your mind about Facebook.

I'm going to tell you a story. Its a true story and there is no quiz at the end. I've opened a facebook page for EVERYONE to put their Facebook nightmares down in one place.

One day I went to open a facebook account. I opened my account with my real name and uploaded a real picture of myself. I then put in my real details and started uploading pictures of my favorite band. I filled out my entire profile and added friends and family members to my account. Then I decided to open a fan page for my favorite band. Once I decided to do that I wanted to add friends who had similar likes than me. So I looked up friends who liked the same band in the search bar. I found lots of people and added some as friends. I added some each day and got many that added me back with no problem. I even was able to talk to some of them. I chatted with them and started to get to know them. I had around 250 friends on my list.

I worked very hard on my new Facebook Page and uploaded thousands of images of my favorite band putting them nice and neat into albums where it was easy for others to find what they wanted. I posted on my new page and made comments as well. Every day I would check my page & account for new friends and likes on my page.

One day I had logged into to my account and started checking the friends I had made and posting on their timelines thanking them for adding me as a friend when all of a sudden I could no longer login to my account. I got an error message saying the account was locked and needed to be verified. "Verified? What the hell does that mean?", I said. So I started trying to jump through the hoops that Facebook sets in place. There was no "identify your mobile phone number", there was no "answer your security question", and there sure the hell was no other ways to validate my account as suggested in the Facebook FAQ. There was only this "identify the friends tagged in the pictures" page. This is a great idea, if your friends put pictures of themselves in their albums. Its also a great idea if your friends do not tag pictures of say Madonna as Chrisy Smith or something to that effect. But when your friends only uploaded pictures of their favorite band in their profiles and tag the band members as themselves you cannot possibly begin to "identify the friends tagged in these pictures". There is absolutely no way to do this unless you had gone through every friends account, looked at ALL the photos they uploaded, took notes as to who uploaded what and what they tagged it as and wrote it all down just in case Facebook locked your account for no reason. Who the hell does that? The identify your friends page is severely flawed and laughable and should be taken out of the hoops you jump through to reinstate an account after its been locked.

So I contacted Facebook and asked them what I was supposed to do to get my account unlocked. Facebook emailed me back and told me that I needed to send them a picture of my legal current ID and that it needed my name I signed up on Facebook with, a picture of me and my birth date. They were nice and said I could, of course, "cover up any personal information" and send my ID willy nilly to someone I do not know and never have seen before and probably will not see ever. For me this presents a problem. I have had an online & offline stalker before, so I'm is not about to send anyone at Facebook a copy of my ID. I have no idea who is on the other end getting this information. This pissed me off because its ridiculous and ludicrous! First I'm supposed to "identify" friends tagged in images of my favorite band as friends from my list and now I will lose my Facebook account because I will not send ANY personal information to ANYONE online for ANY reason. I fired back and angry email and now my account it seems has been completely deleted.

I suppose they have their right to delete an account for any reason at any time, or I'm sure that is somewhere in their terms. But deleting someone's account for just making friends seems a bit extreme.

Here's an interesting tidbit that I bet a lot of people may or may not know. Facebook on occasion, probably about once a month will start a friend add for someone. Confused yet? I'll explain. You login to your Facebook account and have a friend add request. You do not know this person but you are interested in making new friends or possibly you did not pay too close of attention, but you click the add button to add this person as your friend. The next day you login you notice that you have a message from this person who you added as a friend yesterday blowing you away, spewing insults, cussing you out, making fun of your profile and of you, calling you all sorts of names and hurting your feelings. They ask you why you added them as a friend they surely would never be your friend. You message back and say that you got a friend request from them what the hell are they talking about. You run a FB page and get request from people all the time so you clicked add. They message back and call you names again and then you just delete the message and do not read the rest. Now your feelings are pretty hurt and you have no idea what just happened. Well I do. This has happened to me just in this way before. What happened was Facebook has an automated friend add system where about once a month you will get a request to add a friend from an ACTUAL Facebook user. The Facebook user sent no request at all. Facebook sent it automatically. Now you have been hurt because Facebook sent a request from someone WITHOUT their consent to you. They send you request for people you do not know, live near, have met before or met physically yet they lock your account when you make too many friends.

I've always thought that the purpose of using something like Facebook was to connect to new people. Tell them about your product, fan page, or just chat with new people from all over the world. After all its a social network right? Shouldn't you be allowed to be social? Shouldn't you be allowed to add friends and make new friends with people who hold similar interests from you? As far as I know Facebook is the only major social networking site that penalizes you for making friends on it. So watch out before you add another friend while on Facebook. It might just be your last FB friend made.

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Sunday, February 3, 2013

Facebook Sucks

My Favorite Band