ReadWriteWeb is a blog hosting articles about various internet products and trends, including social networking sites. On Wednesday they posted a short article about Facebook partnering with AOL.

Right now you're probably thinking the wank is something about the partnership. That wouldn't be nearly as funny as what actually ends up happening.

The first comment, while not wankish in itself, is a sign of things to come: "Ok If I have to I will comment,I love facebook so right now just want to log in if thats ok with you..lol Keep up the good work..."

Soon the comments start flooding in from people thinking that they're on Facebook and demanding to be allowed to log in, many jumping straight to rage against this new "redesign" such as this woman: "I am going to delete my account (IF I CAN EVER LOG IN) as this SUCKS BIG TIME ! If this does not get back to NORMAL you are going to lose a lot of folks who hate this and as you can see from all the comments they think it sucks too !!! facebook was great for connecting with old friends ...now, NOT SO MUCH. SO HOW DO I LOG IN ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????"

By page three people are wondering if the blog is being trolled, but one of the site maintainers has found the problem! Looking at their traffic stats, she's discovered that they're suddenly getting hits from a bunch of people searching Google for "facebook login". Yes, they're suddenly being flooded by people who don't know how to get to Facebook without searching Google for it. And the article was steadily creeping up the results list all day.

Around this time a big bold paragraph is added to the article informing people that the site is not Facebook, and providing anyone who needs them with links to get there and a suggestion to bookmark the real Facebook login page.

This doesn't help. And, though most people following the thread are amused by what's going on, at the same time the other side of the wank is forming; people who are getting increasing annoyed at the Facebook commenters for ignoring all the people telling them they're not at Facebook, for instance "Wow!

I mean just WOW!.... are people really this f**king stupid, and they rely so blindly on whatever the first link google throws up.

This is NOT facebook you clowns. How god damn retarded are you."

Three days, 27 pages later, and a smattering of news articles later and it's still going on, but at this point the people trying to get to Facebook have tapered off and it's just the people frothing at the mouth about them left.

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yoritomo_reiko
2010-02-14 01:36 am UTC (link)

You'd think so, but I was helping out a girl who wanted to get something off of Amazon for her mom's birthday and couldn't figure out how to order anything. So we start going through and I find out that the reason she's having trouble? Is she doesn't have an e-mail address to start with!

And she's twenty. I couldn't help staring and going, "How do you make it to twenty in this day and age without an e-mail address?"

(Admittedly, I was a year older than that when I made my first web based e-mail address, but that was eleven years ago, too.)

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	snarkhunter 2010-02-14 03:35 am UTC (link)
	You would be amazed at how rarely the Kids These Days use e-mail. I communicate with my students through e-mail, and I don't think they get half of them. B/c they don't check their e-mail. If it's not a text, it doesn't matter! (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	rosalita 2010-02-14 02:18 pm UTC (link)
	I was shocked the other day when my boss was telling me that his son didn't have one. He told me that it's all texting and facebook now. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

bolboreta
2010-02-14 05:02 pm UTC (link)

But... you need an email address to have a facebook account!

Paying any sort of attention to your inbox is a different story, of course. My younger sister's inbox is so full of crap from the various social networks she's in that I'm amazed she manages to find anything in there (she logs in often because she uses it as her IMing platform). She always has more than a thousand unread emails.

And I have university classmates who aren't much better. If the email isn't attached to the IM program they use they only check it once a week tops. Which is fine, until they start giving everybody the non-IM address.

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	librarianmouse 2010-02-14 08:58 pm UTC (link)
	Ha, I should have read yours before I posted mine! (Reply to this)(Parent)

	rosalita 2010-02-14 09:18 pm UTC (link)
	Yeah, he was using his dad's account. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	librarianmouse 2010-02-14 08:58 pm UTC (link)
	But, you have to have an email to set up a facebook account... (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	rosalita 2010-02-14 09:18 pm UTC (link)
	I know. I meant to mention that he had been using his father's email account. And I sure hope he had his comments notification turned off. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	cmdr_zoom 2010-02-15 05:17 am UTC (link)
	And in ten, fifteen more years, they'll just have a near-constant stream-of-consciousness murmur plugged into their earphones and/or brains. Swimming in the real-time datastream. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	librarianmouse 2010-02-15 03:55 pm UTC (link)
	No! That's how the Cybermen take control! (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	cmdr_zoom 2010-02-15 05:41 pm UTC (link)
	WE ARE THE BORG (Reply to this)(Parent)

	adevyish 2010-02-14 08:45 pm UTC (link)
	Yeah I think we give the CHECK YOUR EMAIL, YOUR MARKS ARE GETTING SENT THERE spiel. To be fair, we're sending to new departmental email accounts set up for the students. (Reply to this)(Parent)

varethane
2010-02-14 10:09 pm UTC (link)

This is a bit of a different circumstance because I check my gmail account daily (hooray for having GoogleTalk downloaded!), but I always forget to check my school email... it's a really old server so the user interface is laggy and outdated, and it doesn't even have the capability to set up automatic forwarding of emails. Consequently, when something important is sent there, I tend to get it late because I go through periods of forgetting to log in for months at a time (unless I have something weighing on my mind, like say applying for an exchange program...)

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	moosecharmer 2010-02-16 07:17 am UTC (link)
	But, but, without email how are they going to GET A JOB? (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

limyaael
2010-02-16 11:51 am UTC (link)

A couple of my students apparently expect to be able to text their resumes and anything else to the appropriate places and get interviewed by text.

And I wouldn't even say that they're wrong, except a) I don't think that will happen in the next few years, which is when most of them are graduating, and b) there's a biiiiig generation gap where I live as far as texting goes. Some of the local business owners don't even have cell phones.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

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