The Toxic App that Helps Facebook Eat You Alive
"Unfriend Finder" is a browser extension that lets you know when someone has defriended you on Facebook. It's a very useful piece of software, in the sense that if you ever want to install it you know your life has taken a wrong turn somewhere.
Written up today over on Mashable, Unfriend Finder has supposedly been downloaded 44 million times. It adds a little "Unfriends" section to your profile, showing who has dropped you from their friends list, showing who has declined your friend request, and even putting a little red counter of total "unfriends" in your menu bar, just to make you feel extra shitty.
Says one sane person in the Mashable comments, "If you don't notice them missing, then they probably were not that good of friends." Indeed. But if you've been sucked into a social networking black hole, deep real-world relationships start to lose emotional ground to easily quantified but ultimately meaningless forms of online popularity, and you start to care about the answers to questions like "why are my numbers down?" and "why doesn't this quite possibly insane stranger not like me any more?" If you're a teenager, you may well grow out of this. If you're an adult, it's time for a nice long Facebook break, and to reconnect with things that actually matter IRL, like sports, alcohol, and/or trashy television.
