Uncharitable Semi Rant

Like half of America, I have a Facebook account. Also like most of those on Facebook, I use it to keep track of extended family and old college chums. It's a nice way to mark milestones in acquaintances' lives. I don't anything of real significance there and it doesn't link to any vital or financial information. Hack my Facebook account and you can see the exact same pictures you could see before you hacked my account.

Today I received something from Facebook that surprised me no end. A group I joined back in the dawn of time was spamming my email account with banal Facebook messages. I thought I joined them as a mailing list, although it is possible that I joined them on Facebook when I first signed up.

Here's the rant. Why on earth would someone resurrect a group that had been dead and buried for over two years? We all lost interest more than two years ago (one of the glories of most social media is you can look at the dates on messages). Until Monday, the last message on the group was from early 2009. Most of the messages were from early 2008.

The same people who spammed the group into banal oblivion and howled down any real meaningful discussion back in 2007-2008 were spamming each other again. It's very much like those zombies movies where you think the good guys have killed all the zombies, they've buried them for good and a skeletal hand reaches up from the ground and grabs a foot.

Let the dead stay dead, I say. If you miss the old crowd so much, why not start a new group? Then you can spam each other as much as you like.

Me, I quit the group, again. And set Gmail to mark all the messages received as spam. I'm also exploring ways to set my Facebook settings to 'dull', 'bland' or 'unexciting'.