Neil Ludd Project: Update I
A picture say it all:
So this my first update on the Neil Ludd Project. So far I have learned a lot from this project about the gluttonous, whorish nature of Facebook. For one thing, many people are willing to accept friend requests from strange bald men they do not know. How many you might ask? Well, at this very moment Neil Ludd has 836 friends. He would have many more except for the fact that Facebook started sending me warnings when I was friend-requesting too many people at once with the account. After getting a couple of these warnings, I scaled back my friend-requesting behavior for a while to avoid being banned. I have no idea how many friend requests I have sent out, so I do not know how many people are ignoring/rejecting the request, but I can safely say that the majority accept the requests.
I have gotten two or three people who have sent personal messages asking who I was. I either would respond, “Why, I’m Neil Ludd” or just not respond at all. The irony is at least one of these people still accepted the friendship request. I get many of the friends from groups where people are looking for friends. The rest come from the suggested friends feature and people looking to team up with Neil in the Facebook application Mafia Wars. Embarrassingly, I’ve become kind of addicted to Neil Ludd’s Mafia Wars account, having already leveled him to 150, but somehow justify it to myself by saying its not my Facebook account… Anyway, there have also been a few people who have friend requested Neil. I’m not sure if this is from the suggested friends feature, or from a few of the groups which I threw out Neil Ludd’s name on in hopes of getting people to friend him. At this point I’ve planted so many seeds in so many places I cannot keep track of or even remember them all.
I should note that a significant number of Neil Ludd’s friends are other fake profiles. A few are spammers, but mainly they are alternate accounts people create to play the various Facebook games that clog up your inbox. Still, the vast majority seem to be legitimate people. It’s creepy that Neil Ludd is able to look at pictures of these people’s children, learn about their routines for the day, how they are feeling, and sometimes even more personal information just by looking at his news feed.
Neil receives a lot of requests. Many are for the various games he has downloaded to his account, and others are just invitations to groups, pages, and events. I started out discriminating, trying to reject all requests that were obvious advertisements, pyramid schemes, spam, or offensive/creepy (Neil was invited to a couple of Islamic anti-American groups). Ultimately though, I became lazy and just accepted invitations to everything except for the most extreme or blatantly abusive/offensive pages. Facebook seems to be phasing out groups in favor of pages, so I haven’t been able to find a way to access the groups that Neil is a member of, though I know he is a member of a lot of them. In terms of pages however, he is a fan of over 400 different pages. I was going to have him become a fan of every single Pokemon, but got bored of doing so after searching and adding about 20 Pokemon.
Anyway, I’m going to keep plugging away at this account. The only limits I’ve come across so far are the rate limits for adding friends, but they seem inconsistent, and seem to be more likely to come up when friending a lot of suggested friends rather than searching individual names and friending them. I’ll keep adding friends and becoming a fan of more pages and see if Facebook ever cuts Neil Ludd off, or if they simply continue to feed his information addiction.
One way I could use your help is photographs. Neil Ludd could really use a couple of albums full of photographs. For obvious reasons, I’d prefer photos without people in them. Landscapes and nature shots would be perfect. Hundreds of them if possible. I posted up a bunch of Diablo II screenshots I had just to get something, but I’d much prefer real photos. If you have a bunch you’d be willing to send me, you’d be helping the project a lot. Just please, nothing copyrighted, and make sure they are your own photos or photos you have permission to send to me. Comment below with any questions.
Tags: facebook, information, neil ludd, project