Rob-Rivera.com

Rob Rivera and Facebook

For someone who’s really into what he likes, I usually tend to jump on the internet fad bandwagon a wee bit late, instead opting to use sites and resources that are actually worth a damn. But for every Kazaa, ICQ and LimeWire that comes around every other month, one can’t help but try them out to see what all the fuzz is about. I’ve tried them all, and have always found them to be lacking features that will surely be in the next “it” program or service… always happens.

Enter social networking sites.

One of the great wonders of the internet is the ability to make friends you would otherwise never come across. People find comfort behind a screen and keyboard to be a lot more outgoing than they would be in person, so much so that sometimes it can feel like you’re talking to two different people. For example, back when I was young and naïve (as opposed to today where I am older and stupid), my first experience with young love was through an ICQ window. To this day it pushes the wrong buttons and as much as I tell myself it’s stupid, it really isn’t. The point is that all of this lovey-dovey nonsense happened through the Internet, and when it was time for me to meet this person, it was as if I didn’t know her. The person in front of me, with her attitude, was totally foreign to me. This would be the first of many times I’d be bamboozled into this digital hook-up (both with that same girl and others) and the difference between back then and right now is that instead of flowering intentions up, people are much more direct. I guess that’s how cybersex started, but yesterday’s cybersex is today’s flirting. Flirting that, of course, a lot of the time leads to nowhere for a variety of reasons you must’ve surely experienced already.

I started with Hi5, had a pretty good run there. When MySpace blew up, I took pride of being one of the only 3 people on the planet that didn’t have a profile until I ultimately succumbed and created one… one that has since been abandoned because I can’t make it do a damn thing for me. Recently though, everyone and their moms have sent me invitations to join this thing called Facebook, and at first I was abrasive since I didn’t want to end up with a MySpace 2 that I would never find a functionality for in my everyday life. Slowly, though… slowly but surely, my friends would begin to poison my ears with tales of easy functionality and no need to customize profiles. “It’s really easy, Rob,” they would say, and I’d flick them off to show my lack of enthusiasm… until one Sunday night. I got home, I was tired, and yet another invitation rammed my inbox. I figured “what the hell,” and signed up. Put up a picture I had ready for the Porto Diao portal and called it a night.

I woke up, and signed in to see what was going on in my profile before going to the office and jumping Salinas, I already had 21 friends, a bunch of pictures of me I never uploaded and messages in my inbox, invites to events and even something called a “poke.” This is how my sordid affair with Facebook began.

If there’s one thing I find particularly entertaining about these social networking sites is how they make a small country like Panama seem even smaller; it happened to me in hi5 a lot, how every person I ran into was within 3 degrees of separation from someone I knew. This made browsing through profiles fun and that, my esteemed reader, is what it’s all about: browsing through profiles. In all of my forays into social networking sites I prance around like a puma, looking for cute chicks. It kills the times, I get to check out some cute girls and send them a message if I feel like being talkative. MySpace is ridiculous though, it has too many cringe-inducing Emo kids begging for attention (otherwise known as the cock) and I must’ve gone through Hi5’s roster 102 times already. Facebook not only opened a realm of possibilities, but it made it so ridiculously easy for me to target my searches for cute girls to talk to… but here’s where it gets tricky. Lets say I’m browsing my friends’ umm… friends… list and I see a girl I’d love to get to know a little better. I click on her picture (a lot of the time it’s of her in a bikini, and the rant-provoking feeling this gives me is enough for me to write a separate piece about it) and instead of getting her profile, I get what I’ve come to call a “tease,” as in a small entry where the thing displays several ways to contact this person. So here I am, Facebook-retarded Rob, trying to figure out what to do to communicate with this woman. She is blonde, and has a beautiful smile. I’m all up in there, but how? I look to the right of the entry, and I get the following options:

Send Message

Poke (NAME)!

View Friends

Add to Friends

This allows me to apply some sense of strategy to things. If I send a message to what’s-her-name, then she might think I don’t give a crap if she feels comfortable with a stranger sending her a “hello.” In all honestly, she would very well be right in that regard, but what I want is to establish a conversation without scaring her off too soon. Adding her to my friends list is also a gambit because of one very important fact that is my downfall at that point in time: I am not her friend. I could browse around her friends list for someone who knows her and prepare the landing field for my impeding arrival but that would be doing the same exact thing you have to do in real Panamanian life to get anywhere with a girl and that’s just lame. I believe the internet was forged so that one could escape their own reality and acquire free pornography. This leaves me with the Poke feature. Waitaminute. What in the world is that Poke thing anyway? I click, and the following prompt message appears:

You are about to poke (NAME). She will be informed of this the next time she logs in.

I press the “Ok” button and I get a “hurray! You poked her!”-type message and that’s it. Simple as that. At that moment, I get the Poke feature and its sheer brilliance: it’s not as forthcoming as sending a message and it’s not as abrasive as simply sending her a Friend Request… it’s like a nudge. Something to call someone else’s attention. I just found my new favorite toy of the Facebook sandbox. My policy from that point on would be that if I get poked back, then it’s a green light for me to send a message… I poked. And I poked. And I poked and poked and poked. I found the Panama network, one that had over 6,000 members, and I browsed through every page poking every reasonably attractive woman I could find. Many were poked by my trigger-happy finger. Many found out about one Rob Rivera.

I took a look at my profile after that and filled it out, being as honest as I can without getting into the interests and what not deal. I figured that by hooking up my profile to my site’s RSS feed would be enough for people to get a sense of who I am and where I stand with things. Soon enough, I started getting poked back… and the messaging phase began.

Since I’ve only beet at it for a week, I’ve found it remarkable how fast this whole thing works. I’m currently talking to 5 cute girls, all of them very friendly and approachable, and not only that but I get updates on what every one of my friends is doing via their own profiles. Also, the problem of wanting to know the cute friend in the picture with your own less attractive friend is over due to a tagging system that has face recognition; that’s holy I managed to have a mini gallery of pictures without uploading any! Anyone can tag anyone, and there’s no limit to how many pictures you can upload. It’s ridiculous! It’s all so easy. Downsides to the enhanced accessibility that Facebook provides have got be the ones I tie to people from the past: there are people in my friends list I don’t particularly want to know about that are there and, whether I like it or not, I get the nitty gritty on what they’re up to and vice versa. Watch as how people on Facebook will read this and think it’s directed to them. Look, it is, alright? I don’t want to know what your favorite TV shows are, jackass. Nobody cares.

I found people from my school days (in fact, there’s a group that’s dedicated to people that attended my high school! Go figure) that I thought were dead. Instead they got odd-looking breast implants and now look like Chyna. Now that I got lazy about browsing the entire Panama network I’ve resorted to browsing my friends’ profiles (and their own friends’ profiles as well. Got to love connectivity in the digital age!) And this doesn’t see signs of slowing down anytime soon. I don’t have to worry about customizing my profile, uploading an image album is a breeze as is customizing my details and by God, I love poking people. You don’t understand how much I like poking people.

Also, in the hundreds of profiles I’ve browsed through during my time as a resident of Facebookland, I must be the only person in Panama (and Colombia, apparently) to have his name on his profile picture, like I’m some kind of cocky bastard. I take pride in that. It’d be different if I was putting on a funny dork face or something but no, it’s like I’m commanding the Roman armies against the threat of invasion.

Facebook, from both a user’s and programmer’s standpoint, is a dream. It has so many features that make me want to look under the hood to see how it ticks. It’s simple and on-the-go… ideal for people like me, with a kinetic attention span. Odds are there will be another social networking site in 6 months from now that will blow my socks off harder than this one has, but I’ll enjoy the ride while it lasts. I’ll poke my way through the storm until the next “it” site comes around.

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