This week I’ve been working on the Mr Whitty Sings Christmas site. You can go to the site, watch the live video stream of Mr Whitty and even request a Christmas song for him to play. It’s gone down pretty well so far. Possibly the funniest moment was a re-enactment of Jesus’ birth. Jesus was a doll of one of the Little Britain characters and Joseph was in an Elvis costume.

Happy Christmas
Mr Whitty, the human Christmas jukebox

Here’s an idea I’ve had and will never do anything about so I thought I’d put it out there and see what people think.

My problem is that on my Facebook (this idea could apply to other sites but in this post I’m just going to use Facebook) I have lots of people listed as friends. I have a few close friends, then I have friends who I know but who aren’t close – workmates, friends of friends and so on. Then the bulk is made up of the people who I haven’t seen in years, but for some reason are still my friend. The result is too much information for me to manage that isn’t effectively organised. Sure, Facebook lets me define who I want to hear more about and who I want to hear less about, but this is a manual control and I think it should be able to work this out by itself.

How can a system like Facebook work out which is more important to me: wedding photos from someone I went to school with; knowing that my flatmate ‘is bored at work’; or photos of my workmate’s new dog?
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Why do people I haven’t spoken to in years and haven’t thought about in nearly as long request to be my friend in Facebook? Why do I do the same thing to the other kids who lived in my neighbourhood when I was growing up? For the same reason: to see who’s fat, who’s failed and who still lives at home.

There’s the albino kid who dropped out of school; the sporty kid who was loud; the clever one who was obnoxious; the guy who I thought would never be a civil servant but is. All of the above: their lives aren’t quite as rosy as their school reports may have indicated.

It sounds elitist and terribly mean, but everyone seems to be doing it. Only the other day someone I work with said how she just saw wedding photos on Facebook of a girl she went to school with who punched her in the face once. She got fat and hadn’t aged particularly well, which had an immediate and positive effect on my colleague’s outlook on herself.

I think it’s all about self-assurance. The best way we can see how well we’re doing in life is to compare ourselves to those we started out with. Where are they and where am I?

Of course success is measured by the individual’s perception of what success is. The girl my workmate poked fun at may in turn see my colleague and think how she’s approaching 30, working too hard and still has no ring on her finger, and then there’s no sign of kids for the next few years at least.

The friends in your Facebook aren’t necessarily your friends. They’re individual benchmarks for you to measure yourself up against. Although be warned: the slow kid who wet himself in school assembly that one time who is now a successful entrepreneur with a supermodel wife may find you on Facebook and might just ruin your day.

This is a game created by CNN. It’s based on a very old game, where the player moves the paddle at the bottom of the screen left and right to stop the ball from dropping, and at the same time deflecting the ball at the right angle to break the blocks at the top of the screen. The game is played in this instance by the audience swaying their arms to the left or right.