Tech News Is So Phenomenally Boring
You never read tech news, do you? Good. Somehow, the story of the accidental early release of a Facebook iPad app everyone was expecting is threatening to turn into a week-long saga. Make it stop! This is the most boring shit ever.
Here is the story so far—keep a friend with some smelling salts handy in case you fall off your office chair and into a boredom-induced coma: Facebook has been hinting for a long time that it's going to release an iPad app. Turns out that in the last update of the Facebook iPhone app, the iPad app was hidden inside. A writer for TechCrunch discovered it, did something weird to his iPad to make it work even though it hasn't been officially released yet, then wrote a couple breathless posts about it.
In tech media, this has been treated as if a full-scale replica of Machu Picchu had been discovered on the far side of the moon. Marvel at these "spectacular" features of the leaked Facebook iPad app, revealed!
1) It does everything you can do on Facebook.
2) Except on an iPad.
But just when you thought it could not get any less exciting, Facebook blocked the iPad app, prompting a hacker to develop a whole new app called FaceForward, the sole purpose of which is to allow you to use the leaked Facebook app. FaceForward will also be blocked and another hacker will make another Facebook-iPad-app-enabling app which will also be disabled. This supposedly is sticking it to Facebook, though, if you think about it, Mark Zuckerberg isn't wasting hours trying to unlock a Facebook iPad app that will be available to everyone in a few days.
At this point you have probably entered the boredom-induced coma, then passed out from boredom in the dream you were having inside the coma, Inception-style. It's OK, this often happens to me in the morning while skimming Techmeme for all the hot aggregated news about indistinguishable companies with names that are slightly-misspelled verbs buying each other for millions of dollars. What I do is place an air-horn on my keyboard: the pressure from my forehead slamming down onto it sounds the horn and wakes me up. Actually, that would be a pretty good iPad app.
Anyway, it's maddening but not very surprising that this fractally boring story has had such long legs, since "leaked" "Facebook" and "iPad" is the holy trinity of tech blogging, worshiped with the same disregard to logic and relevance as the real trinity. Not that we'd ever write about such dross.