Sunday 29 January 2012

Friends in a Box

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Scrolling back through my new timeline layout in Facebook I was reminded of another “in the box” story (compare yesterday’s post). In a FB comment just before New Year, I mentioned that I intended to have friends over for the occasion. Mysteriously, as I was writing, the word friends caused an automatic suggestion to pop up  that maybe I meant FRIENDS as in the TV show!

Actually it was a little spooky, because I was in the middle of re-watching that series on DVD. But how on earth could Facebook know? And rather rude of them to suggest that I’d have nothing better to do on a New Year’s Eve! (Not to mention that the assumption on this particular occasion was actually wrong…)

Why it happened has remained a mystery – until now. I just figured it out. It so happened that when writing that status update, I used the phrase “me + friends”. It seems it was the + that did it! (Perhaps you already knew that. But I didn’t!)

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3 comments:

  1. neither did I know this. hummmm another FB moment...

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  2. Not only another FB moment, Monica, but you might as well have been writing in Swedish because Jag förstår inte.

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  3. Graham: And I who thought I was being so pedagogical, with screendump and all! It seems that on FB, when you write the + sign and then another word, up pops a link list with FB-sites to do with that word. If I write "me & friends", then nothing happens. But if I write "me + friends", then I get the pop-up box with all kinds of popular "friend"-related stuff... So I experimented using "+" with other words as well and the same thing happened. (Not on my phone, but on the computer.) Jag hoppas du förstår nu! (you are so cute when you write Swedish)

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