“You like someone. They’re in a relationship. Be the first to know when they get out of it.”
Mantra for the too-persistent suitor or tag line for one of the latest social networking applications?
Maybe it’s both, but in practice, the short and sweet (and somewhat creepy) one-liner is the tagline and marketing slogan for Breakup Notifier, an app that enables users to receive e-mails when select friends change their relationship status.
Within about three days of its activation, Breakup Notifier attracted 3.6 million relationships of its own.
But after that short romance, Facebook disabled the application, pulling the plug on a relationship still in its early stages.
With the influx of demand for the app, why end it?
It turns out that Breakup Notifier was, in fact, too successful — it caused too much strain for Facebook’s servers, and more important, it attracted too many stalkers.
Because, in essence, that’s exactly what we’ve become today: born-and-bred stalkers. College students, along with younger and older age groups, display their lives on Facebook.
You may say, “Oh, I’m not like most of my friends. I’ll check it every once in a while, but a stalker? Not I.”
Don’t be so quick to say so.
Let’s take it down to the most simple situation. You sit next to a girl in class, you get to know her, and after a few painstaking lectures you finally figure out her last name. What do you do?
You add her on Facebook.
And just like that, you know everything you need to know: You’re cognizant of the fact that she’s single. You run a sweep of a few recent statuses, see a few sets of vomit-inducing lyrics from Top 40 radio jingles, and conclude that she just ended a messy five-month relationship with a John Patterson, who conveniently goes to FSU. Green light!
Or, you add her, notice she’s dating someone, and — um — add her to your Breakup Notifier list? Of course the app is dead now, so that’s not a possibility.
But that specific app is just part of a wave of conclusive evidence of America’s obvious stalker-like nature.
Chevrolet also recently introduced a new application in its Cruze model that reads live-time status updates from the driver’s personal Facebook news feed.
That’s right: You just finished a long, hard day of work, you’re driving home to spend the night watching old episodes of “Hey Arnold” on Netflix with your cat, but first you need to know what all of your friends have been saying since you last checked your Facebook for iPhone app 15 minutes ago.
Luckily, the all-new Chevy Cruze lets you do it hands-free.
America, our problem isn’t that we’re stalkers — it’s that everyone knows we are.
People and companies spend their time and money making applications, widgets and gadgets that feed our inner stalker because they know we’ll not only use them but will absolutely devour them.
It’s not just that Internet-based stalking has taken off to a whole new level, but that enough people realize it that businesses have begun to cash in on the phenomenon.
So, after all the sarcasm and rhetoric, I’ll bet that you, reader, think I’m completely against this social networking and stalking stuff.
Well, that’s not the case — well, not entirely at least.
The truth is, America’s shift toward being nosy isn’t a good or bad thing. It just is what it is.
Yes, maybe I think the general population has gone a tad overboard with it all. But, at the end of the day, it’s not anything that’s going to change soon.
And I, like everyone else, will be keeping an eye out for the tweets and Tumblogs and status updates to surface about the next big Facebook app.
