revenge of the facebook haters

While working on a story about one of my favourite topics (revenge!; see if you can find it in Saturday’s paper), I stumbled upon a cool new add-on to Facebook. It’s called Enemybook and it lets you list your enemies on Facebook, then tell the world why you hate them.

Enemybook creator Kevin Matulet calls it “an anti-social utility.” From a Boston Globe article published last week:

“People are yearning to express the ridiculousness of some of the features of Facebook – having all these friends that aren’t genuine,” Matulef said. “For some people, Enemybook is about expressing their distaste for political figures or celebrities. And for other people, it actually is about spreading hatred for their despised co-workers and exes.”

At last check, George Bush was Enemy Number 1, far ahead of Hilary Clinton.

Now, as the world knows, I famously abandoned Facebook in May. But I maintain a cleverly disguised (friend-less) account for research purposes. Yesterday, I used it to try to “enemy” someone. But in order to do that I had to ask someone to be a friend. Once that happened, many other former Facebook friends (ok, two) spotted my cleverly disguised account and contacted me. So I ended up befriending them, then quickly enemying them. Then I “flipped” them, an Enemybook feature that allows you to give the finger to your enemy via email. And now I have de-friended and de-enemied everyone on my lists.

All of this to say that I still hate Facebook, I’m not using again – and, to the friends who I enemied and then flipped the bird to, it was all in the name of research.