I joined Facebook this morning. I received an invite from a friend of mine and decided to finally join. I've been an ardent LinkedIn fan for some time now so I thought Facebook would be more of the same. LinkedIn is a professional networking site which I use as a self updating contact database (I can't wait for the LinkedIn APIs - so I can build some Microsoft CRM integration).

So I signed up to Facebook and accepted the invite from my friend. I decided to spend five minutes clicking around see what all this Facebook stuff was about. I know we recently announced some kind of API partnership and that Bill Gates, Ray Ozzie, Steven Sinofsky etc all have Facebook accounts. If we do business with them and our super senior execs are into it: surely it must be interesting. That's not what I found. What I found was scary. Within a handful of random clicks (I'm an infamous random clicker) I was presented with a list of married colleagues who are looking for casual sex. Yes: that's right. No search terms. No bugs. No accidents. It was like stumbling into the Craiglist personals with everyone’s real names published.

I discussed my experience with one of my ‘hipper’/’younger’ colleagues and he confirmed my worse fears. Yes, married means married. Yes, ‘random play’ means casual sex. Yes, ‘random play’ is a high level taxonomy description. I’m not against swinging. I’m not against casual sex. However I just don’t need to know about it. It conjures up images of ugly fat people and a bowl full of car keys. If you are married and want casual sex: it’s just sleazy. I certainly don’t need to know about in a work context. Now I’m sure that some of these people are just fooling around (in the humorous sense) with their profile. I’ll never look at those people the same way again.

Thanks Facebook. You suck. I hate you.