The essence of the internet

I'd like to draw your attention to the Did you know area on the sidebar of this blog. It is here that I dump amusing bits of trivia and other things that pass through Google Reader, saving them from complete obscurity.

For example, I just shared a post that Sam shared from his Reader. It's like I "paid it forward" without all the touchy-feeliness and a stabbing at the end.

You might call those links my 'lazy-man's blog', since it requires almost no effort to produce, and they are all just someone else's stuff. It is the essence of the internet, my friends.

That post that I just re-shared was about how, in the age of facebook, we never have to lose touch with friends anymore; how we can hoard every person we've ever met, forever. The author suggests the 'fade utility', where those friends we don't communicate with much sort of turn yellow and gently fade into nothingness. A cute idea, but then, it kind of defeats the whole point of facebook. If I just used facebook to communicate with the friends I communicate with anyway, well, that would be just like real-life, wouldn't it?

To simulate the fading (without the disappearing), I set my news feed to mostly display feed information from people I want to get information about, and less for those other people who would probably 'fade' away if we had the utility activated. Facebook provides a number of ways to 'fade' out stuff. Every entry in your news feed as options, click it and you can choose "Less about so-and-so", and then it's done.

And frankly, if you want to delete someone you never talk to anyway, just do it. It's not like they're going to notice, right?