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Friday, February 24, 2006

Facebook + Valentine's Day

I conducted a grand social experiment on Valentine's Day (National Singles Awareness Day) just ten days ago utilizing the Facebook. Early on Valentine's day my cousin left the following flower on my Facebook wall.
Happy Valentine's Day
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.From...........@
......Me..........@
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The wall serves as a message board for the owner's friends to leave your messages that are visible to the rest of the owner of the wall's school and the people marked as their friends.

I ended up leaving this flower on the wall of 252 people, all who were marked as my friends on the Facebook. I did not take a preference to whether I really wanted them to have a great Valentine's Day or whether they were male or female. This was all designed to measure a collective reaction of my friends that makeup my Facebook world.

After copying and pasting the flower 252 times, which took approximately an hour of my time, I waited for the respones to flow in. They came fast. Within minutes emails filled my inbox, notifiying me of replies that were being posted on my wall. The girls overwhelming outnumbered the guys in terms of responses. I had 40+ responses from girls, while my male friends, who were often much more funny in their responses, only gave me 11 responses.

What happened as a result of the flowers posting on the wall was even more impressive. A series of discussions broke out on many of my friends walls (all girls of the discussions I noticed) with their old friends from their hometowns (who presumably have no iea who I am) asking who the flower was from and what it meant. It was amusing to watch a few of them try to defend why the flower was there. One of my friends even had to pull the flower off of her wall because her boyfriend thought it one-upped what he did for her for Valentine's Day (which had to be a sad effort).

Keep in mind that this all happened within a span of hours between a group of people spread across univerisites all across the country. It was interesting to watch everything shake out and laugh as the respones came in. Many of the responses told me thanks, they wish they had a cool flower to send back, and that this was the only flower they had received all day. It was hard to measure how many of them continued to pass on the flower to other people via their walls, but I noticed a few for sure that did. It was an interesting way to say hello to a large amount of people who I rarely get the chance to talk to on a daily basis anymore, unlike high school where I would see them every day.

Summary - The Facebook is a great tool for opening the doors of communication between people who you have fallen out of touch with. The site also serves as a great tool to entertain your friends when you have an hour to kill. If I were to send this flower out any other day of the year, I'm sure it would get a better response than it did on Valentine's Day. I'm not sure what college would be like without the Facebook. Your thoughts?

P.S. - I didn't proofread this and I'm sorry for that, drop me a line in the comments and I'll fix any errors.

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