Technically Incorrect

You know this is serious because they've already talked about it on SportsCenter.

Wednesday saw one of the most painful pieces of cheating that soccer has enjoyed since, oh, since pretty much any other World Cup qualifying game.

However, this occurred in the dying minutes, featured one of the most famous players in the world (yes, he's been on the front of an EA FIFA game box), affected the result of the game, and was so crudely obvious that the world has decided to fight back by socially networking.

In case you were only recently released after being abducted by recalcitrant performance artists, France was playing Ireland for the privilege of going to the World Cup finals in South Africa. Ireland was winning.

Thierry Henry, contemplating moral philosophy, when he played for London's Arsenal.

(Credit: Cc BobbyMond/Flickr)

A ball was hopefully pumped into the Irish penalty area. The French captain, Thierry Henry, reached out his left hand to control the ball, enjoyed the feeling so much he actually handled it twice, then crossed the ball for an embarrassed teammate, Willam Gallas, to score and eliminate the plucky Irish. (It is compulsory to use the term "plucky" when referring to the Irish soccer team.)

Henry, perhaps sensing his precious image evaporating, admitted Friday that the game should be replayed.

Even though the sport's governing body, FIFA, has declared no replay will happen, it now has to deal with perhaps the fastest-growing Facebook group on earth.

Petition to have IRELAND VS FRANCE REPLAYED!!!!! already has secured more than 250,000 members since its inception, as well as an increasing amount of media coverage.

What is clear from the group is that people from all over the world are incensed that FIFA has haughtily dismissed the power of the people, the socially networking people. The group has organized a protest in Dublin, 2 p.m. local time Saturday.

If I were one of the fine-dining, bouncy-bellied officials at FIFA, I would pay a little more attention to this Facebook group. The last time someone so blatantly ignored the will of the socially-networking people--who, in the Facebook group's case, include many from France itself--it was a lady who guffawed: "Let them eat cake."

Yes, she was Queen of France and it did not end well for her. I feel sure Marie Antoinette would have wished for a little replay in her own life. And I feel equally sure that, were she alive today, she would be joining the Facebook group "Petition to have IRELAND VS FRANCE REPLAYED!!!!!" in demanding a rerun of this most important game.

Facebook seems to have contributed to countless broken love affairs, divorces, and insane levels of jealousy. People pry into your friend lists and updates until they sometimes reach conclusions far beyond reality. How lovely, then, that a mere status update appears to have saved a Harlem man from jail.

According to The New York Times, Rodney Bradford decided to update his status with a call from the soul. "Where's my pancakes?" is the Times' translation of a status update it says was written in "indecipherable street slang." The fact that Bradford did this at 11:49 a.m. on October 17, using his father's computer, meant that he would not have to suffer pancakes of a more distasteful nature in the local penitentiary.

(Credit: CC Slushpup/Flickr)

Bradford, you see, was arrested the next day for robbery. However, after he was booked, his lawyer was intelligent enough to update the district attorney with news of Bradford's Facebooking.

A subpoena was swiftly flung the way of the Zuckerbergville crew so that they might reveal whether the timing and location of the update were correct. They were, meaning Bradford could update his criminal status to "cleared."

There are some, however, who are not entirely convinced the charges should have been dropped. Joseph Pollini, a teacher at the Department of Law, Police Science and Criminal Justice Administration at John Jay College of Criminal Justice told the Times: "With a username and password, anyone can input data in a Facebook page."

He also offered a dire warning of the infinite dastardliness of people Bradford's age: "Some of the brightest people on the Internet are teenagers. They know the Internet better than a lot of people. Why? Because they use it all the time."

Oh, why is it so hard to give young people the benefit of the doubt--especially on Facebook?

I'm sorry to be mentioning sex again. But I have some survey findings that might just interrupt your own cogitations about the meaning and function of life.

The fine and upstanding folks at Retrevo.com, which, I believe, is a site where you can buy various sorts of electronica with which to record your most public and private moments, decided to survey today's under-35s.

And what appalling people they seem to be.

Indeed, Retrevo's findings are so disturbing that I wonder whether the roboticists are right to suggest that sex should be a matter of adjusting one's own chemistry rather than attempting to consort with another human. To wit, in the words of blogger Michael Anissimov, one of the "leading thinkers in the radical tech community" who were invited to pontificate in the lustrous pages of H Plus magazine: "The connection between certain activities and the sensation of pleasure lies entirely in our cognitive architecture, which we will eventually manipulate at will."

I am haunted by the drastic prognostications by the salivators over The Singularity about the future of sex. Indeed, some words of Anissimov are rattling around my head like those of a particularly angry former lover. Speaking of this beautiful future, he said: "I could make any experience in the world highly pleasurable or highly displeasurable. I could make sex suck and staring at paint drying the greatest thing ever."

Over capacity? And why might that be?

(Credit: CC Playerx/Flickr)

But where would we be without the current version of sex? No governors of South Carolina dancing the Argentine tango. No jokes about presidents and cigars. And not anyone telling us that, indeed, we are the best.

What a dull thing the future might turn out to be.

Which brings us back to the current state of concupiscence and Retrevo's discovery that 36 percent of people leap on to Twitter or Facebook immediately after conjugal behavior.

Not just once or twice, but "often." What can they possibly be tweeting? What words and phrases can their Facebook updates possibly enjoy? "Jeffrey H. has just got some"? "Melissa J. is in flagrante"?

Or perhaps something as very basic as "Tracy T. is single"?

My gob is quite simply smacked at the idea that people must trumpet their intimate behavior within seconds of its climax. I do, however, have more interesting information.

Apparently, men are twice as likely to broadcast to their social network immediately post-flagrante than are women. This despite women allegedly being the majority on most social networks.

And if you are one of those who believes that iPhone users are deeply narcissistic nabobs, then please consider this most disturbing piece of news: iPhone users are three times more likely to tweet or Facebook post-coitally than are BlackBerry users.

I find myself so completely shaken by this data that I feel an inordinate need to lie down for a period of some months.

Has this social-networking nonsense so completely gripped our very beings that we are nothing other than newscasters of our own ridiculous subjectivity?

My girlfriend says she'll let me know what she thinks about this, but first she's got a few tweets to send.

When I lived and worked in Warsaw, Poland, just before the turn of the century, I had a client who was about to make a TV spot. The client insisted on a Polish director. We offered the name Marek Dawid.

"Who's his DP (director of photography)?" the client asked.

"Pawel Edelman," was the answer.

"Oh, I'm not having two Jews on my shoot," came the reply, which was both stunningly anti-Semitic and frighteningly stupid, as Edelman went on to be DP on such movies as "The Pianist."

I tell this story only because Poland, despite its pride in being the only European country occupied by Nazis that didn't have a collaborator government, is not devoid of anti-Semitic attitudes.

This is why many will welcome the creation of an Auschwitz Facebook site.

Auschwitz, a very real place indeed.

(Credit: CC Lumiere/Flickr)

According to the BBC, the authorities at Auschwitz, as bleak and frightening a place as you can ever visit, view the site as an experiment but hope that it will be a lasting reminder to younger generations of the concentration camp's painful significance in history.

Pawel Sawicki, a museum official at Auschwitz, told the BBC, "If our mission is to educate the younger generation to be responsible in the contemporary world, what better tool can we use to reach them than the tools they use themselves?"

These tools are already being used, after all, by those who seek to deny that the Holocaust ever happened, which has led to much controversy as to whether they contravene Facebook's terms of service.

The new Auschwitz Facebook site allows for discussion and, as yet, nothing has been posted by deniers.

However, it will be interesting to see whether, over time, it will serve as a lasting reminder when there is no one still alive who personally experienced Auschwitz's horrors.

Should you be one of those who believe that men are neanderthal, socially awkward hairy animals while women are socially aware, smoothly sensitive beings, then I have some statistics that might increase your estimation of your own superior judgment.

According to research by Brian Solis, sourcing his data from Google's Ad Planner, the majority of functioning beings on almost all social networking sites are women.

Published on Information Is Beautiful, the numbers might create an encouraging belief that if social networking is the future, then the future is female.

Solis's figures suggest that there is only one major social-networking site that is predominantly male: Digg. I know you'll recoil uncontrollably when I tell you that Digg appears to be 64 percent male.

(Credit: Information Is Beautiful)

On the other hand, LinkedIn and YouTube seem to enjoy an equality of fraternity and sorority. While Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, Flickr and MySpace, to name but a few, are all, like the population of Brazil, queendoms.

Perhaps the most extraordinary numbers come from MySpace. Somehow, the rather messy nature of the site, the tradition of an excess of spam and porn, might suggest that this was a male-oriented (slightly sleazy males, some might imagine) haven.

These numbers, however, suggest that MySpace is 64 percent female. Which makes one ruminate as to why the home page currently has so much blue and so little fuchsia.

It will be tempting, indeed, for many to put these figures down to traditional psychological differences between the sexes: women like people and men like, well, peeing in public.

However, one might also conclude that women simply resort to more virtual contact because their real world physical everyday life leaves them rather more dissatisfied than it does men.

Lately there seems to have been much evidence that women are increasingly miserable.

Celebrated and, one might have imagined, happy women such as Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post (The Sad Shocking Truth of How Women Are Feeling) and Maureen Dowd of The New York Times (Blue is the New Black) have lamented the lot of Lot's Wife, Mother, Sister and Daughter.

Might misery be driving women to MySpace?

There were those who believed that the creator of the "Should Obama Be Killed?" Facebook poll might be a sinister white supremacist out to cause world disruption.

Some were less convinced, as all the four potential answers to the poll--"Yes", "no", "Maybe" and "if he cuts my health care"--were spelled correctly.

Now, according to the Associated Press, the Secret Service, which quickly went into action to pay the poll's author a social call, has announced that no action will be taken against the creator. (A separate person, a poll software developer, came forward earlier this week and had what he described as a "friendly" talk with the Service.)

"Case closed," Secret Service spokesman Edwin Donovan told the AP. "I guess you could characterize it as a mistake."

It was mistake that appears to have been perpetrated by a juvenile who, presumably, thought it was, um, funny. The Service met with both the juvenile and his or her parents (no details about the person's identity are being revealed) and decided, perhaps, that a little grounding might be sufficient.

Still, it is worth considering just what developers and Facebook itself might do to get a slightly firmer grasp on alleged amusements posted on the social-networking site.

(Credit: The Huffington Post)

A very swift wander around Facebook revealed to me a 145-member group entitled "All Traffic Wardens Should be Killed."

Another 34-member group is dubbed "Perez Hilton Should be Killed."

Other personalities who seem to be the object of Facebook death threats include soccer player Didier Drogba, as well as British pop group Take That.

"Twilight" star Robert Pattinson is the subject of a Facebook group called "Who Thinks Robert Pattinson Should be Killed?"

There is a 32-person group that should concern many readers--it certainly concerns me greatly--called "All Ex-boyfriends should be Killed."

And two groups, called "Everyone Should be Killed," seem to walk a tender line between equanimity and insanity.

In fact, if you perform the Facebook search for "should be killed," you get no less that 500 cheery, little groups.

So is this the time to mention Facebook's own terms of service reject all content that is "hateful" or "threatening"?

Updated 2.37pm PST with comments from the developer

The first step in discerning the source of the "Should Obama be Killed?" Facebook poll has been taken.

Jesse Farmer, of Bumbalabs in Palo Alto, Calif., has given permission for Facebook to reveal that he was the developer, but, significantly, not the author behind the poll that nauseated many Monday.

The poll, which was removed by Facebook when it was brought to the site's attention, offered those who wished to enjoy such an exercise four potential answers (see screen grab by The Huffington Post). More than 730 people participated before it was removed.

On Farmer's Twitter feed, Twitter.com/jessefarmer he describes himself as "Entrepreneur living in Palo Alto, Calif. I grew up in the Midwest and think everyone is awesome." Which will naturally be a relief to many.

(Credit: The Huffington Post)

On his site 20bits.com, which I am fairly sure stands for one more than 19 bits, rather than two obituaries, Farmer seems a genial and sociable type, saying: "If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, drop me a line and let's meet up!" He may be getting one or two requests.

Farmer describes himself as "a bit obsessed with data and using it to build better products and companies."

On his Twitter feed, he declares that he has already talked with the Secret Service, who he endearingly abbreviates to "SS." Farmer posted: "The conversation with the SS was fine. If the goal was to resolve the issue + inform the SS, the way it went down was suboptimal."

A reading of a rather fractious Twitter exchange with Bababoosh, an Oklahoma City programmer, suggests that Farmer was unhappy that a third party had informed the Secret Service rather than leaving him to do so.

Farmer accuses Bababoosh of assuming he had "the worst motives."

In an e-mail to Technically Incorrect, Farmer says he first saw the offending and offensive poll Monday morning.

"I have a system in place to flag potentially offensive polls that I check once per day; I checked it Monday morning, saw the poll, and deleted it," he said.

Which might make some wonder what other potentially risque polling might have slipped onto Facebook's pristine pages.

He says that he knows the Facebook identity of the poll's author and one presumes that this author might have received a social call from the Secret Service.

Farmer's own chat with the service he describes as lasting 15 minutes and being "friendly," although he won't comment on specifics.

Perhaps it might amuse some and appall others to discover that he is an Obama supporter.

He told me: "I went to school at the University of Chicago (SB Mathematics, '06), where he was my state senator. I volunteered for him in the primaries, worked with the California data team, and canvassed in N. Michigan during the general."

All human life is to be seen on Facebook. Which, for some, is not necessarily a good thing.

Facebook has removed a poll asking "Should Obama be killed?" But not before at least 730 people took part in the poll. The poll offered four potential answers to the question: "Yes", "No", "Maybe," and "If he cuts my health care."

The Plum Line, a Washington Post site, reports that the Secret Service has begun an investigation into who might have been behind such an imaginative exercise. It appears that a blog called the Political Carnival first noticed the poll and alerted the Secret Service over the weekend.

(Credit: The Huffington Post)

Facebook is increasingly becoming a popular forum for all kinds of hateful speech--from Holocaust Denial Groups to anti-Muslim organizations. Groups purporting to hate specific individuals have also found a home on Facebook, and the company has not found it easy to keep up with the amount of policing that is required to cover more than 300 million members.

However, this poll will represent for many an entirely new dimension in human dementia. It will be interesting to see how quickly the source is located and who that source might turn out to be.

Facebook's Barry Schnitt told me in an e-mail that while the site doesn't comment on actions against individual users, "penalties for posting content in violation of our policies range from warnings to temporarily or permanently disabling accounts." He also confirmed that the site is working with the Secret Service but couldn't provide any details of their investigation.

As to the source of the poll, he said: "The third-party application that enabled an individual user to create the offensive poll was brought to our attention this morning (Monday). It was immediately suspended while the inappropriate content could be removed by the developer and until such time as the developer institutes better procedures to monitor their user-generated content."

I know those chaps at MIT get involved in some strange pursuits.

But here's one that might make some readers feel that the world is now irreversibly eerie.

According to the Boston Globe, two MIT students, Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree, seemingly fascinated with ethics and law and, possibly, other people's sex lives, became enraptured by how much information people are revealing through their Facebook profiles.

So they delved into some Facebook profile data and believe they have created software that can tell whether someone on Facebook is gay, merely by looking at his or her friends.

Especially, it seems, his friends.

(Credit: CC Todd Huffman/Flickr)

Although the students couldn't actually prove that what they surmised was true, they used what they seem to describe as personal knowledge and concluded that their program was especially accurate when it came to identifying gay men.

One of the students' professors, Hal Abelson, used some interesting imagery to describe their apparent discovery, now excitingly dubbed Project "Gaydar." Said Abelson: "That pulls the rug out from a whole policy and technology perspective that the point is to give you control over your information - because you don't have control over your information."

I'm not sure I am quite as excited by this rug-pulling as Professor Abelson.

In the real world, one's choice of friends may, indeed, send out signals about all kinds of characteristics and predilections one might have.

And in the Facebook world, who cares if someone is gay or straight? They're not real friends anyway, are they?

However, I am not frightfully fond of the concept of even well-meaning uberbrains trawling through my personal things in order to make assertions about who, what, how or even where I am.

I am sure, for example, that if I were to come to your house and examine your underwear drawer I might be tempted to reach certain conclusions about your lifestyle.

I might, though, just be wrong, mightn't I?