Are you a FaceBook user? Tired of making friends with friends you’re already friends with and asking them to plant imaginary plants for you? Maybe you should try FaceStat. It’s sort of like drive-by social networking. You only need an e-mail and a photo, and you’re off. The objective: judge others’ photos and let them judge yours. I made the mistake of using a real photo of myself, and offering honest judgements. Five hours later, all I had learned was that: 1.) I’m Definitely Straight AND Definitely Gay; 2.) I Need a Haircut; and 3.) People are just plain mean when they’re given the chance. I was pretty amused when a couple of women started insisting I looked like Tim Gunn, and that no, really – that’s okay. My “Word Cloud” by now consisted of “creepy”, “RISKY”, “wipped”, and “old”. That was it. All the results still weren’t in (the site said it would take about three hours, and it had been nearly six now) and already, people who’ve never met me were calling me creepy. Meh. Two can play this game. I went after male users first, because I’m intelligent enough to know (in spite of my low FaceStat intelligence rating) that men

are much more likely to make insensitive remarks, especially when there are no repercussions. Like me punching them, for instance. Then I went after any females that were making gang signs or doing that MySpace lip-pursing thing in their photos. I typed lots of condescending comments about wine coolers and trailer parks, and asked them who helped them turn their computer on, that sort of thing. Thirty or forty minutes later, I was exhausted, and didn’t really feel redeemed. It’s not nice to be not nice. I forget that sometimes. And if you actually believe that I really went on the vendetta I just described, it’s probably just because YOU think I’m RISKY, wipped, and old. I can’t honestly imagine the value of this site; there’s nothing to keep it honest, and no real reward. The actual stats HAVE to be crap, it’s just common sense that there would be a lot of careless, unthinking entries along the way, and no way to accurately filter them. Makes me think of things like CNN reader polls. The results are useless, because they’re culled from repondents stupid and bored enough to fill out CNN user polls. This is sort of reaffirmed by the fact that next to your FaceStat results it says: “Here are your statistics! Not happy with the results? Invite some friends to come defend you.”