Keep it on the telly, please!
The news that ITV will be launching a social networking version of their flagship soap Coronation Street in November may be exciting ITV execs who believe they’ve cracked a way of getting in touch with the all important Internet savvy 16-24 demographic … but for me, it’s the final nail in a Facebook coffin that I’ve been trying to bury for a long time.
I was an early exponent of the Facebook revolution. I couldn’t find a flaw in a system that allowed me to keep in touch with old friends, electronically leaf through candid bikini shots of former lovers and keep an online social calendar which was easy to use and more importantly, worked.
You can mark the moment I joined Facebook by the ‘last login’ date on my Myspace account, the social network that got too complicated, too slow and too annoying for anyone except hardcore HTML freaks and peddlers of poorly recorded unsigned music acts.
Six years later, I’ve shunned Facebook for similar reasons.
Whereas in my heyday I would login to Facebook three or four times a day to see what was happening, in the last month I did it once, in total … why? Because it’s full of crap.
Now let’s just get one thing straight, I’m not saying that Corrie Nation, ITV’s 2D Weatherfield experience will be rubbish (although it might) … I’m simply saying that I don’t want to have to fend off daily invitations for a pint in the Rovers Return with Emily Bishop or Steve MacDonald whilst I’m trying to reject an invite to house party from someone (real) that I don’t like.
Its such a shame it’s got to this, but I hope that some of you, somewhere out there share my pain:
If I want to use Skype to get in touch with Eneida, I’ll do it myself, I don’t need half my homepage taken up with a message telling me how to do it. If I want to play Farmville with Stuart I’ll remove what’s left of my brain and send him a witty agricultural ice-breaker by email. Mafia Wars is not fun, so next time one of my Facebook ‘friends’ (most of whom I haven’t seen since they were in nursery school) decides to shoot me, mob me or carjack me … can you kindly tell them to b*gger off!
And before you start saying it’s all a matter of settings … it’s not. I’ve been through the back-end of Facebook more times than you’ve had potato wedges and no matter what I do, my e-life is still filled with moronic vacuous invitations from people I hardly know asking me to do things I either don’t understand, or don’t want to understand.
Imagine throwing into this already untennable mix of timewasting silliness Britain’s Favourite Soap® and its ten plus million loyal fans, it’s going to be bedlam online.
Contrary to ITVs hopes, I don’t think it’ll be the youngsters who’ll embrace the cartoon Norris Cole or appoint Ken Barlow the new boss at Underworld … it will be people who actually watch Corrie religiously … that same bunch of bored housewives who spend millions of pounds every year on online bingo and buy those soap magazines.
But at the end of the day, I don’t really care who’s sending the crap to me … I just want it to stop …
… and that ladies and gentlemen is why I’m off to join the 6.1 billion people who don’t use Facebook … very often.
