Sometimes Facebook (and other similar sites) are unintentionally poignant. Take this example:

Isn’t that just tragic? There are no quotation marks around that “friends” - it’s just there on its lonely own, as if Timothy really doesn’t have any friends. In reality, this Timothy just hasn’t convinced himself that the whole Facebook thing is worthwhile yet and so hasn’t translated his myriad real-life friends into Facebook “friends”. Still, if I were him I’d add just one contact just so it isn’t quite so pathetic.

This is my inbox right now (actually, 2 minutes ago when I started writing this post - it’s since got an out of office reply from a colleague in it, but that’s easily solved).

It’s been quite some time since my Inbox was empty - I’ve been too swamped with other things to deal with a myriad of small items that’s come up and once it gets beyond a certain point I tend to let it go entirely as a lost cause until I have some clear time to deal with it all.

I actually gave an audible sigh of relief and my heart lifted for a moment when I finally returned to that pristine, empty Inbox. Who knows how long it will stay that way, but it’s a pleasure to look at for the moment.

Nice that we can have some simple pleasures in amongst the other stuff in life.

Oh dear, two emails in there already. Better stop blogging and get back to managing my inbox… Sigh…

I just tried to sign up for Google’s new FriendConnect service. I filled in all the details and clicked “Submit” and then up came this page:

It appears Google is using one beta service (Google Spreadsheets - specifically, the feature which allows you to use forms to create spreadsheets for databases) to register for another (FriendConnect). As a result, “something bad happened.” This probably isn’t best practice for a hotly-anticipated new service from Google, much as I understand the urge to eat one’s own dogfood, as it were. Wouldn’t a standard web form with a more robust backend have done the trick?

At any rate, I’m looking forward to trying out the service if and when I can get it working. Looks like an interesting approach to “socializing” non-social networks, but a lot will come down to how it works in practice. I’m also looking forward to trying the other similar initiatives that were somewhat suspiciously all launched within a few days of each other (MySpace Data Availability and Facebook Connect).