How to Argue on Facebook

Friends,

In one of life's great mysteries, I've been giving a lot of attention to my devotional blog and almost none to this one, though the readership of Tangent Space(s) dwarfs that of the other one. As the New Radicals crooned in the days of my restless youth, "Someday We'll Know why..."

But now, O readers, I present a Tangent forged in the flames of internal fire (once I committed to the vocative 'O', I had to end the sentence with something alliterative and epic). We discuss a topic that I both love and hate, and love to hate, and hate that I love, a topic not unlike a car crash from which I can't look away...

Arguing on Facebook.

The Facebook Argument Paradox
You can't live without them, and you can't make them better... until now.

Here's the thing. In a perfect world, debates-- ethical, political, religious, or otherwise-- wouldn't primarily occur on a superficial, delete-able, Like-able, unfriend-able, poke-able social media site rife with pictures of duckface selfies and newborns. But I'm afraid that's the world we live in.

The truth is that conversations, whether they turn into arguments or not, about things like marriage equality, gun control, religious freedoms, abortion, etc., ought to be happening. While, again, Facebook is far from the ideal place for this, it happens to be the setting, at least for now, where people share their opinions. I think there ought to be a way for people to discuss important issues in the medium that is currently most popular for having discussions.

The problem (which you already know if you've used Facebook during an election year) is that these, ahem, discussions often deteriorate into the text versions of all-out bar fights. (I have absolutely no idea what an actual version of a bar fight is like, but I've watched plenty of motion pictures.) 

How should we respond to the history of mean-spirited, illogical, non sequitur, and/or ad hominem tirades we've seen (or taken part in)? It seems like the two most common responses are to 'sink to their level' by spouting off our own angry outburst, or to flee the scene and not take part in any controversial Facebook conversations.

But what if, instead, we could agree to some ground rules? Because I love Aaron Sorkin, what if we borrowed the rules from the reboot of News Night from his HBO hit The Newsroom (as seen here)? 

Facebook Argument 2.0

1. Is this information that people need in the voting booth?
While this isn't the same rubric you or I would use in our Facebook debates, the principle is the same-- is it worth it to weigh in on this? Just like News Night only has 42 minutes of news it can report, you only have so much time and energy to devote to public forums. Choose topics that are important and about which you know something (otherwise just reading and learning would be better).

2. Is this the best possible form of the argument?
Think before you type. Also, read and re-read what you've written before you hit enter. There are many drawbacks to responding in emotion and haste, and making a bad argument is one of them. If after thought and reflection you realize you can't actually argue your point well, again it's probably better to just read up on the topic instead of entering the fray.

3. Is this story in historical context?
Just like it would be shoddy for a news organization to report one event or quotation outside its historical context, so it is when you or I angrily opine on only one facet, element, or quotation from a much larger issue and ignore the many other factors connected to it. This again calls for thoughtfulness; do I understand the entire issue? To give one small but timely example: in the recent Hobby Lobby decision, religious freedom and contraceptive/women's/health rights are both major factors. Both need to be considered. A man has to do his best to understand a woman's perspective. An irreligious person has to do shis best to understand a religious person's perspective.

Just as Mack randomly added a fourth rule, I will do the same:

4. Be kind.
This seems to be the hardest one. Especially when the person you're arguing with is a 'Facebook friend of a Facebook friend', making them essentially not a real person to you. But here's the thing-- they are all real people (except of course for Catfished profiles, but I'm sure they avoid political debates). The people on Facebook, however ignorant, misguided, 'bigoted', short-sighted, unenlightened, or stupid they may be-- are people. You may despise their opinions, beliefs, arguments, etc., but please still show them basic human respect in your disagreement. This allows an environment in which other people can contribute their ideas on all sides of an issue. If you just bash a person, or even bash them back, the conversation is over.

[Note: I've even called out people before for breaking rule 4. Perhaps I shouldn't have, but I have. They usually respond that they were only violently thrashing the person's stance, not the person himself. If that helps someone sleep at night, then okay. But in my opinion, violent thrashing need not enter the picture at all. Saying, "I have no idea what you mean here... your argument makes no sense to me because... I absolutely disagree with your conclusion because" is so much better, to me, than "your idiotic argument... one of the dumbest things I've ever heard... it's insane that anyone would think that way..."]


What has your experience been with Facebook arguments?

Have I forgotten any crucial rules to making Facebook a better forum?

Do you think we can pull it off? Can social networks be a place where conflicting ideas are meaningfully shared with each other?

Jon

From katu.com

Third Annual Facebook Birthday Wall Post Analysis

Friends,

Two years ago, I decided to do a thorough (if unscientific) analysis of the Facebook wall posts people sent me on my birthday. [If you have tons of free time: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3] Then last year I revisited the subject with a new set of data and some encouraging conclusions. (Also, if you haven't yet, check out the comments on the 2012 post to read about how my initial study was a factor in a couple getting married!)

This year I considered abandoning the wall post analysis. It seems like I've beaten the crap out of that horse's corpse, and what does Tangent Space(s) offer if not the promise of something weird, interesting, pointless, and new?

What changed my mind?

The number of texts, remarks, and yes even wall posts, that communicated a fundamental misunderstanding of my stance on the birthday wall post.


What has been the point of all this?
Existential crisis much?

This year, before and during my birthday, many people said what amounted to: "I'm too nervous to write on your Facebook wall this year!" The perception seems to be that, because I obsessively blog about birthday wall posts, I must have some sort of wild, unattainable expectations for how awesome a post should be.

But this isn't the case at all! Have these people even read, re-read, and memorized my blog entries?! My thesis has never, ever been that people need to put a lot of time into the post or work really hard to make me laugh or cry. There are no high expectations here. My point has simply been that a personalized post is always significantly better than an unpersonalized post. This doesn't mean you have to write a sonnet or recollect our inside joke from 10th grade. It just means you should add to "Happy birthday" something-- anything-- that pertains to me and/or our friendship.

This could be the tiniest change. Consider the following two hypothetical posts:

Happy birthday, Jon!
vs.
Happy birthday, Jon! The Ravens suck.

The second one is so much better than the first, and it requires almost no special research, knowledge, creativity, or work. All that to say that making someone's birthday better is easy. And to say that the Ravens suck.

My 2013 birthday wall
It was a very good year.

After that stern bit of education, I want to thank everyone for making this my best Facebook wall birthday yet. I've streamlined the stats into just 'Personalized' and 'Not Personalized', though in the chart I do take special note of video/pictures and posts that mention this beloved blog.

To put these numbers into perspective, here are the results from my last 3 birthdays:

2011:   14% of posts were personalized
2012:   26%
2013:   28%


Your two cents
If you haven't already given me your life savings on this topic

What's your favorite type of birthday wall post to receive? Funny photos or videos? Inside jokes? Old memories? Or, um... "Happy birthday."

Jon

Don't text while driving or while making an important relational decision

Friends,

Before I start in on this topic, I have about a million disclaimers to make.  A few of them include the facts that:

- I love facebook
- I love my iPhone and its sundry features
- I check my email all the time (in fact, too many times)
- There's no actual recent example of texting (etc.) that is motivating this blog post, so no need to be paranoid or suspicious (unless you broke up with me in 8th grade via a note; you know who you are)
- I'm not writing this from some moral high ground.  I'm writing it from a cocoon of blogging, texting, and emailing from which I rarely emerge

So don't read this as an attack on technology or social media.  I'm not one of those oldfangled people griping about how smartphones and the internet have robbed us of face-to-face interactions with each other.  I'll never advocate a long-term abandonment of facebook in order to free up more time for, um... honestly, I'm not even sure what else there is in life. 

And yet, and yet...


The evils of written text
I was torn between "sundry" and "divers" in that last section, but I was worried you might think I meant "more than one diver"

There are just some things [apologies, confrontations, break-ups, rejections, and the like] that need to be communicated in person.  Or, if not that, over Skype.  In the absence of physical presence or video chatting, some form of telephone.  But don't write it down.  Don't ever write it down.

The problem is, written communication, in which you don't have to look a person in the eye, is just so much easier.  And that, of course, is why we do it.  In the face of something potentially scary or nerve-racking or unpleasant, we'd much rather communicate the words without actually saying them.

The problem with that problem is, people have dignity that demands personal, actual communication. When you need to make one of these communications, I think it's a pretty simple cost-benefit analysis:

the other person's need to be dignified as a human vs. my desire to be comfortable and/or save face

And honestly, I think it pretty much comes down to how selfish we are in that moment.

In sixth grade, it was easier to ask out girls in a note instead of in person or on the phone.  So we sometimes did it that way.  It must have been much, much easier for those girls to break up with us in a note, too.  Because they often did it that way.  In high school, when we were too old for notes but before texting had been invented, we sent our friends to tell people we were mad at them, or else did it over AIM.  In college, we left a note that said, "Dishes!" on the sink.

The only thing we didn't do was make meaningful noises with our mouths to the actual people involved.

And now, in the information age, we have many more weapons in our talk-dodging arsenal.  We've graduated from wide-ruled notebook paper and post-its to texts, emails, and Facebook messages.  But the dilemma is the same, and so is the solution.

Look the person in the eye.


Please comment (ironically in written text form)
But there's no dilemma, unless you're planning on breaking up with me via a blog comment

Do you struggle with this communication dilemma?

Have you been hurt by a text that should have been a meeting? 

Am I making all of this up?

Jon

I'll tell you how it's going

Friends,

I'm sorry about the delay.  Last week I bought a really nerdy card game, and the late night hours when I normally blog have been spent trying to acquire more victory points than my friends.

Anyway, I think most of my Tangents fit into one of three categories:

a list or analysis of things from pop culture
a philosophical idea or lesson learned from a personal story
a foaming-at-the-mouth diatribe against something that annoys me

Today's Tangent is from category 3, but no worries-- I got my rabies shot (thanks, NBC, for your awesome PSAs).


The problem with pleasantries
Beside the fact that they're not pleasant enough to warrant that name

Most conversations start with Hello, Hey, or Hi.  The h-word of choice is then immediately followed by a question, e.g.

How are you?
How's it going?
What's up?
What's going on?

The first two represent questions about quality of life, and the second two concern recent or interesting happenings.  I will address both types, but my main issue is with the former.

Questions about how a person is doing just seem like stupid ways to start a conversation.  Let's say I'm doing pretty terribly.  The following will transpire:

Person: Hey man! How's it going?
Me: (It's going suckily.  I've got 8 work things stressing me out, 3 relationships on the fritz, I'm having a bad hair day, new bills just arrived, I can't find my favorite t-shirt, my laptop crashed, I stepped in a puddle, and I have no plans this weekend.  And diarrhea.)  Good, thanks!  How are you?

There's no option in most conversational settings to reveal how crappy we might be feeling.  As I'm shaking hands with someone at a coffee shop, it just doesn't seem okay to reveal that I'd rather be at home on my couch and not have to move or think for the next 24 hours.  And yet, I'm asked how I'm doing.  "Pickle!!!"

The other type of opening questions aren't much better, mainly because no actual answer is expected.  To ask someone "What's up?" is just another way of saying, "Please say 'Not much' and then begin our actual conversation."  Were it an actual question, it would be difficult to address right at the outset of the conversation; I mean, a million things are going on, and filtering which ones are worth mentioning is too much mental strain for one moment.  That's why we have the actual conversation, to bring up and discuss those things that are up.


A problem with no solution
To be fair, there definitely might be a solution.  I just don't offer one here.

It seems to me that the only ways to break out of this pickle would be to stop asking these meaningless opening questions or to start answering them earnestly.  But neither one seems feasible.  They're so ingrained in me that I don't know if I could quit asking them.  And I hate to say it, but on those rare occasions in which someone answers honestly about hurt and pain and discouragement, I can't help but think, "Dude, quit being such a Debbie Downer.  We're in an Applebee's."

Other people try to circumvent the superficiality by asking, "How are you doing -- really?"  But unless you're on the phone or alone somewhere, this just seems too emotionally invasive, especially for the very first thing said in a conversation.


Your turn
No funny small text this time.

What's up?
How's it going?
What's going on?
How are you?

But seriously, comments appreciated.

Jon

Facebook birthday wall posts: one year later

Friends,

You may remember my 3-part series last year on facebook birthday wall posts.  The topic continues to fascinate me, so I thought we could briefly revisit it now that I have more data (i.e. I've depressingly gained another year of age).

Last year the three posts examined when people posted on my wall, exactly who posted, and (most interestingly) what they posted.  This year, I've again tabulated the results, but we're going to focus only on the last category -- the content posted -- because, well, it's the most interesting.

What people posted
and how it compares to last year

If you don't have the time or inclination to visit the above link to "what people posted," I'll summarize to you my methodology.  I place all facebook birthday posts in one of three categories:

1. Standard
This is the worst type.  It containes only the phrase "happy birthday", with a few possible things tacked on at the end-- exclamation marks, "dude", "man", or in my case, "Jon."

2. Standard Plus
Don't let the name fool you into thinking this is a good option.  It's just the standard wall post above with an added platitude, e.g. "hope you have a great day!"

3. Personalized
These are really the only acceptable wall posts, in my opinion.  Whether you personalize the post with an inside joke, memory, poem, or a video of a smiling chimpanzee, these posts actually make the birthday person feel valued.  Now, for some reason last year I split this category up into two subcategories.  But you can mentally group together the green and purple in the graphs below.



2011 birthday wall posts by type



2012 (better) birthday wall posts by type


What we can learn
nothing important, I'm quite sure

The main takeaway here is that -- Yahtzee! -- my facebook wall was noticeably better this year!  Standard Plus stayed where it was, while 12% of my total wall posts shifted from Standard to Personalized!!  Way to go, internet social network.

Why did this change take place?  I have a few ideas.  A. My friends are cooler now than they were last year.  B. I unfriended the lamebrains who posted Standard birthday posts last year.  C. Last year I blogged extensively about birthday wall posting, and approximately 12% of the crappy birthday posters in my social network took it to heart.

But that's just speculation.  Some things we'll never know.

Interesting development(s)
My dream of this blog and the world becoming reflections of each other is finally coming to fruition

My blog was referenced, directly or indirectly, 6 times on my birthday facebook wall.  I'd like to acknowledge the contexts:

My friends bmcnees and Tim vied for supremacy on this blog's MVC page. (For the record, Tim currently sits at #1.)

My friend Beth worried she would be used on here as an example of a bad birthday poster.

My friend Rob randomly brought up last year's posts.

My friend kmech confessed the pressure she felt from last year's posts, then shared an awesomely touching message of missing me and our friendship!

My friend Kendra pulled off the near-impossible-- a Tangent Space(s) reference so amazingly obscure I had to go back and read last year's blog entry to make sure I was remembering it correctly.


We can pick up this conversation again in about a year.

Jon

Facebook Pet Peeves

We can be honest here, right?  I hope so.  Because honestly, sometimes I feel like I live on facebook.  My life wasn't always like this, and I trust it won't always be.  But right now, as I work from home and some days have about 12 minutes of work to do, "home" and "facebook" can start to blur together.

I bring that up because A. as I just clarified, this is a place of honesty, and B. when you're home, you expect people to behave the way you want them to.  So the more that facebook feels like home to me, the lower my tolerance becomes for people who violate my internal set of facebook rules.

But I can't complain, because I've never explicitly told anyone what these rules are... until now.


Facebook Rules*^


1. You better use your last name. 

I've never really understood this.  For some reason, some girls (and only girls) feel compelled to be known on facebook only by their first and middle names.  I can only assume this has something to do with privacy, but with all the privacy settings available (including the ability to be invisible to any non-friend), I don't understand how there can be any real threat of stalking.

The reason this matters is because WHO ARE YOU??  When you come up on my newsfeed as Elizabeth Joy, Shannon Kristen, or Anna Lisa, I have no idea who you are.  The time it takes to visit your profile and use my detective skills to figure out who you are is time I could have been... um... I don't know, doing something better.


2. Can you change that wedding profile pic after, say, 6 months?

I'm sure your wedding day was the most wonderful day of your life.  And that's awesome.  But when you've been married for a year and you still have the same black and white picture of jumping down the aisle that you put up the day after the honeymoon...

Look, I know it's probably just the cynical, doesn't-like-weddings part of me talking.  But like I said, it's my home, so could you maybe change the picture after we've all lost our short-term memories of your big day?

Not to mention, haven't you done anything else fun this past year?


3. You can either invite a million people to an event or repeatedly send a message to all invitees, but not both.

Having a small get-together and need to send out 8 last-minute messages?  No problem.  But if you have, via your friends' friends' friends, invited 13,000 people to some charity barbeque, how dare you spam them all with message after message?  If I were willing to devote more time to this, I could probably make some equation that relates the number of invitees to the number of permissible mass messages.  But alas, even I have other things to do.

The real issue here is that the little red talk-bubble icon up in the corner is exciting.  When I log on and see that I have a new message, I'm happy.  But, seconds later, when I see it's some change in plans for the car wash I was never even considering attending, that happiness is instantly transformed to annoyance.

What's that?  You say it's all my fault for putting too much emotional stock in getting messages?  It's my home.  Get out.


*This is a list of rules for facebook, not simply a statement that "Facebook rules!!", though that is also true.
^These are rules for my guests, i.e. those people still on my newsfeed.  There are many, many more general facebook rules (e.g. no Farmville), but since violators of these rules are instantly and eternally banned from my home, i.e. removed from my newsfeed, such rules have been left for another discussion.



It's your home, too (or at least pretend it is)

What are your biggest facebook pet peeves??

Jon

P.S. If you didn't notice yet, check out the new pages at the top of the site under the Tangent Space(s) banner.  They're not only for you, they're about you!

Facebook birthday wall posts: part 3/3

[Part 1: At what time did people post happy birthday?]
[Part 2: Who posted happy birthday on my wall?]

And now, the epic conclusion to my facebook wall research.  I hope you've appreciated the unimportance of this exercise and sensed my overall mistrust of statistics and people's presentation of them.  And yet, it's so fun to make graphs and talk about numbers.  Seriously.

With that barrel of monkeys in mind, we move to the best facebook birthday topics I can give you -- questions about what people wrote on my wall to wish me well.


What did people post on my wall for my birthday?

It was much easier to create categories for this than for people's closeness to me (it just felt horribly wrong to toss around the idea of a "people I despise" category for my facebook "friends").  There were four natural categories that emerged (with a few sub-categories) as I looked at my birthday wall:

Standard  The very, very basics.  Ex.:

• Happy birthday!!
• Happy birthday man.

Standard plus  The above, plus an additional platitude.  Ex.:

• Happy birthday, Jon!  I hope you have an awesome day!
• Jon, it's your birthday!!  I hope it's a blast!

Entertaining  Anything bizarre, silly, or fun that isn't personalized.  Ex.:

• A video of a giraffe licking someone's face
• A philosophical rambling about the meaning of a facebook wall post

Personalized  An inside joke or recalling of a memory.  That's pretty self-explanatory, right?

So, obviously there is a demarcation between "standard plus" and "entertaining."  The first two categories (which we might call Level 1) require absolutely no thought or effort.  The latter two (we could of course call them Level 2, but I'm now tempted to go with Latter 2, because it occurred naturally in the sentence) require thought, effort, and/or some level of actual friendship.

In summary, then, insofar as facebook birthday wall posts can be said to have any quality or value whatsoever, Level 2 posts come across (at least to me) as much more thoughtful and meaningful than those in Level 1.  So, how did my recent birthday wall break down?

So, the sad reality of my social network, humanity, America, and Gen-X is that only 14% were willing to rise to Level 2 for my birthday.  Kudos to those people.

About half the posts (52%) put me to sleep instantly, while another third (34%) caught my eye for a brief moment before causing me to doze off.

Another interesting factor(!)

Surely, you might think, there are ways to show you're excited for someone's birthday on shis wall other than creativity or personalized messages.  No, you're mistaken.  But a popular attempt to do so is to throw in some number of exclamation marks.  I decided to monitor the concentration of this powerful punctuation on my birthday wall:



This chart shows the number of people (y-axis) who used the indicated number of exclamation marks (x-axis).



If the presence of exclamation marks can be trusted (it can't), at least 98 people were really excited for my birthday!!!  One person, as seen on the chart, was ecstatic enough to somehow use 13 exclamation marks in one birthday post.

In total, 190 of these bad boys were thrown down for my birthday, for an average of 1.57 exclamation marks per post on my wall that day.

(Un)important conclusions and questions for you

If we can learn anything from my study (we can't), let it be this-- if you're going to write on someone's wall for shis birthday, take the extra minute to give a Level 2 message.  If you can't reach L2 for that person, you probably have no business writing on shis wall.

Also, when it comes to exclamation marks, go big or go home.  With an average of over 1.5 marks per message, tacking on one obligatory "!" at the end just isn't going to convey any excitement.

• What is your practice when it comes to writing on people's walls for their birthday?

Jon

Facebook birthday wall posts: part 2/3

[Part 1: At what time did people post happy birthday?]
[Part 3: What did people write on my wall for my birthday?]

This tangent, we move forward to the second installment of Facebook birthday analysis: who, exactly, posts on one's wall on shis birthday?  You might be thinking, "I have my own birthday and my own facebook wall.  Why would I need this study to answer that question?"

Well, let me answer your fictional thought-question with a question: Do you have the time or inclination to scour through dozens and dozens of posts and think through how many ridiculously non-friend people show up or from which eras of your life the people hail?  Assuming you have a job or a life, your answer's probably "No."  My answer, however, is "yes."

Enough guesswork Q&A.  I give you the two questions of today's tangent, both of which look at the personnel of my online birthday:


1. How close to me were the people who wished me a happy birthday?

This is, I think, one of the most interesting and pressing questions in our whole study of Facebook b-days.  There always seem to be people showing up on your wall once a year whose name is barely recognizable, or whose last real-life interaction with you was a violent blood feud.

To answer this question, I had to (somewhat morbidly) assign closeness categories to my wall posters.  Everyone fell into one of the following categories:

Family: relatives through blood or marriage.
Friends: people who have a consistent, positive presence in my life and from whom a wall post on a different day of the year wouldn't seem strange.
Barely: this weird limbo exists for people who are distant acquaintances or people who were in my life years ago.  A wall post from them on any other day would be odd.
None: these people have absolutely no part in my life, and their post to me, even on my birthday, is somewhat mystifying.

Well, it's a pretty even split between Friends and Family (48%) and... everyone else (52%).  It really goes to show how powerful a force the Facebook Birthday is -- it can create a social interaction that would otherwise never be there.

One final interesting note on this is that one person who posted on my wall existed on shis own special level of "No relationship."  This was a person (friend of a friend) with whom I have literally never had an in-person OR online interaction.  How we became facebook friends in the first place is an enigma.  How a birthday post came about might literally make my brain explode with mystery.


2. From which phase of my life did these well-wishers first know me?

They say high school will be the best years of your life.  Then when you're going off to college, they hope you've forgotten that statement and tell you the next four years will be the best.  Middle school, well, everyone pretty much concedes that's going to be a dramatic, hormonal disaster.

But when it comes time for the annual "crawl out of the woodworks" online fiesta, which era will represent?  In my social network, there are three 4-year time spans that figured to make solid birthday contributions: high school, college, and "Pittsburgh" (the four years I've spent here in grad school and with my current ministry job).  And here's what happened:

As you can see, the general rule was that the more recent the era, the greater its contribution.  There's a logic to that, as these are people I've met, become facebook friends with, and interacted with more recently.  So the relationship, as "distant" or "non-existent" as it might have been on the previous chart, is fresher.

The one meaningless but funny exception to this law of diminishing wall posts was the dreaded middle school.  We must have really all tried to blot that crap out of our memories.  Except for my perennial locker and homeroom neighbor Cherie.  The alphabet has a funny way of affecting unimportant parts of your future.

Help build momentum for the dramatic conclusion

Next time we'll look at the most interesting topic -- what, exactly, did people post on my wall?  Until then, please tangent with me:

What's been your experience with super-distant people or mortal enemies wishing you a happy birthday on facebook?

Was middle school as bad for you as it was for everybody else?

Jon

Facebook birthday wall posts: part 1/3

[Part 2: Who posted happy birthday on my wall?]
[Part 3: What did people write on my wall for my birthday?]

A real blogger recently reminded me (more on that in a future post) that when people decide to read a blog entry, they're not necessarily willing to give it 3 hours of their lives.  And so, O reader, I will try to make these musings short enough for one sitting.

So when a topic comes along about which I have a lot to say, I'll break it up into multiple entries.  And if facebook birthday wall posts isn't one of those topics, what is?!


Where we're going on this two-part tangent

Everyone who has bought into facebook (i.e. has a bunch of friends and stays pretty active with posts, comments, messages, etc.) gets bombarded on shis birthday with wall posts.  It's just the way of the world.

But have you ever really thought about what kind of bombardment your wall is enduring?  I had a birthday recently, and I decided the 121 birthday-related wall posts I got would be a large enough sample size to figure out exactly what happens to someone's wall on that special day.  And, in fact, I think it will do more than that -- it might tell me something about my own social network.

The questions I wanted to answer all fall into roughly 3 categories:

1. When did people post on my wall?
2. Who posted on my wall?
3. How/what did people post on my wall?

These questions will be the three parts of this Tangent Series.  I think the second and third are much more compelling, but I arbitrarily typed the three in the above order, and so we start with the questions of timing.  Would the biggest rush be right at midnight, or the 8am-ish start of most people's day?  Would the fact that my birthday was on a Friday eliminate most or all evening wall posts?


When did people post "Happy Birthday" on my wall?

The graph shows the concentration of birthday wall posts in hourly slots.  The hour listed on the x-axis is the beginning of that slot, so, for instance, "10am" means the hour from 10am to 11am.

There's nothing earth-shattering there, but I think it describes facebook usage trends.  A decent number of people are on facebook after midnight, and some of them like to jump on the instant birthday post train.

It's no surprise there's a lull in activity during sleep hours, and then BAM-- from 7am to 11am is the peak of wall post activity.  My best guess is that most people who write birthday wall posts (I'm notoriously not one of them) tend to do so the first time they log onto facebook in a given day.  A natural time to log onto facebook for the first time in a given day is 8 or 9am.

The only other thing I have to say is that, despite my birthday's Friday orientation, there were in fact some evening posts.  But notice the awesome "social life lull" from 8-10pm.  I guess 10pm is the time when people get back from whatever they're doing and hop onto facebook.

I know facebook is how I spend my Friday nights.

Next time: Who writes on one's wall? Friends, enemies, people whose names you don't even recognize?

For now, just let me know what you think of the graph, if you have any thoughts or observations.  Also, share what your facebook life is like -- when and how often do YOU log on?

Jon