Chris Alexander
18th July, 2009
That may seem like a pretty stupid question to be posing to someone; that’s because it is. But it is just one of the latest quizzes that have appeared in my Facebook news feed over the past few days, continuing the trend of frequent and clearly annoying quizzes that people seem to be willing to complete these days.
At least I have some justification for not calling this an out-and-out rant: apparently the Canadian government aren’t too keen on it either. You can tell something has gotten out of hand when it has its own website.
So, I decided to give it a shot, see what one of these quizzes would be like to take. I did a Facebook search for “Quiz” and picked one from the first page of results. To spare the author of the quiz I will not share it’s name or questions which I deem irrelevant for this post.
The first thing that worried me was being asked to allow a simple quiz access to my photos, profile, friends information and “other content” that apparently it needs in order to work. I found this suspicious, but I carried on regardless (I will block it again later).
So next up appeared the quiz - with a giant advert at the top. Pretty unsubtle.
5 pretty pathetic questions later, and I’m presented with a screen saying this:
Now at the first pass I thought this was a requirement to send it - then I saw the “proceed to results” button and hit that instead of spamming some friends just for a blog post. Apparently I’m good for something, according to this (can you tell I’m not impressed?).
Now for the bit that surprised me the most - in this particular quiz, it is possible for you not to publish your results to your news feed - so does this mean that all these people posting these quizzes that spam up my Facebook page so horribly have done it deliberately?!
So why does this happen on Facebook, when people are just as able to post something like this on Twitter? It just doesn’t seem to be prevalent yet, and hopefully it will stay that way. Personally I much prefer the little nuggets of opinion that Twitter provide - if I want to know which London Underground line you are, I will be sure to ask you.