The Facebook Douchebag Quotient

Facebook is my second, ok, third favourite new geekyness of the year (after my iPhone and lolcats). Despite the wonderous waste of time in hitting ‘ignore’ for the latest inane pirate / ninja / super-awesome-totally-better-than-the-last-super-wall oriented application I receive an invite for, it has actually provided the ability to contact people I haven’t talked to for ages, and allowed me to email people who change their real email address / lose their phone more often than I complain about tourists dawdling outside of my work building trying to get into Century 21.

But with all good things, must come the bad, and the great Karma Leveller of Facebook is the Facebook Douchebag. All of you who have used Facebook know them – they have a profile photo that makes them look way better than they do in normal life, it takes 10 minutes to scroll to the end of their profile page, they have 5 new brain-numbing applications everyday that you get spammed with notifications for, and that’s just for starters.

In my new found work-life as a manager (yes, I know that makes me a whole other class of douche, and yes I can deal with that, thankyouverymuch) I use metrics often to categorise problems. And as such, I look for a metric to qualify the douchebageriness of certain individuals on Facebook. I think the answer to my search is a simple formula:

Dq (Facebook Douchebag Quotient) = x / y, where x = number of photos of yourself you’ve added to your profile, and y = the number of facebook friends you have.

My suggestion is that Dq should always for any reasonable human being be less than 1. Frankly, anything more than about .5 is questionable. Mine is something around 0.01, but then again, I link to my Flickr page from my Facebook profile so that may be considered cheating. The biggest douche I’ve yet to come across has a Dq of 2.5 – undeniable by any standards, even before you hear that the latest applications on his profile are What kind of flirt are you and How classy are you?

The only question that remains is what to do when you identify a Facebook Douchebag – remove them from your friend list? Humiliate them on their ‘Wall’? Email all their friends? Or just passive-aggressively call them out on your own navel-gazing part of the information superhighway?