Facebook is an Interesting Social Experiment on Just How Many People Truly Are Sheep

It all started with chain emails which would state something like "forward this to every single person in your contact list or you will have 7 days of terrible luck" or something similar. Some even had interesting sliding scales where if you sent it to half, you'd only have 4 days of bad luck. Nice of these things to have discount options.

Now we have Facebook where status messages often contain "real friends will copy this status" insinuating that anyone who doesn't isn't a real friend.

The last craze to go around was the bra colour thing where women would set their status to the colour of their bra, supposedly in support of breast cancer awareness even though the majority of people really didn't know what was going on. This spawned the 'awareness' craze where anything and everything that people could possibly have became a status message that insisted that "people who care" would copy and paste it.

Did anyone really care about those follow up awareness issues or did they simply want to see how many people would copy them? It even went so far as to have one stating "everyone knows someone who is an idiot. This is to raise idiot awareness" and so forth. It was an obvious parody which garnered the same results. People copied and pasted.

Every time I see a Facebook status message that concludes with "copy and paste this to your status", I cringe and find myself deciding on if I should remove this person from my friends list.

The latest crazy is even funnier where people (mostly kids) are creating groups which promise you the world if only you'll suggest the group to every single friend you have.

I've seen people promise farmville items that aren't even in the game, some promise multiples of things you can only get once, some promise thousands of rewards coins in games like Mafia Wars or others like it. Some groups even promise to let you roll back to a previous version of Facebook if you don't like the changes they make.

And the instructions are always the same, stating that you must suggest ALL of your friends. Not all minus one, not half, not a few... all.

I shouldn't have to explain this but Facebook doesn't even track if you send to 'all' friends. How is this kid tracking it when he doesn't have access to their code? Also, Facebook doesn't offer the ability to roll back to a previous version, how would this random kid be able to do it?

Going one step further, how does this random person have the ability to track through Facebook's code and end up giving you extras from a 3rd party company that they have no affiliation with? Oh right, they can't. No extra Farmville land or Mafia Wars points for you.

This wouldn't be so bad, and would be almost comical if not for one small thing... people don't just fall for it once! They join group after group after group hoping that just one of them will give them this wonderful bounty that no one else can get and they keep suggesting all of their friends over and over and over again.

There is a lot of wool on Facebook.

The scary part is, these people are out there, in real life. They're your friends. It may even be you!