Facebook Birthday Application: The Zenith of Lazy

It was my birthday yesterday, and like many birthday boys these days I received copious amounts of birthday wishes via my facebook wall.  Now, most of us would admit that facebook has revolutionized the way we connect to and keep in touch with our friends.  To be honest with you though, I was surprised at the number of random people from my past who took the time to comment on my wall.  Of course I know that they logged in and facebook said “Hey it’s Mark’s birthday”, but they still took the three seconds to acknowledge that they saw said advertisement.

Like the sick bastard I am, my thoughts wandered and I found myself wondering if any of these people had an automated program that posted on the walls of daily birthday celebrants (I can’t accept that all of these people might actually give a shit about my day…haha).

Anyways, my conclusion was that it would be awesome if someone wrote a simple facebook app that would automatically post a message of your choice onto any of you friends walls on their respective birthdays.  This way you could fool all of your important friends into thinking that you aren’t a selfish and incompetent fool.

Of course the core functionality of this application would be a simple programming task.  However, more complicated versions could contain personalized messages for different groups of friends, and other various settings.  Also, it would be nice to provide people with a meta-language that helped personalize messages.  For example…

“Hey <user-firstName>, Happy Birthday\n\n

<if(today.isShortlyBeforeChristmas() AND user.group()==groups.HomeTown) then insert\”Will you be home for the holidays this year\”"

Haha…of course, you better verify your programming skills, or you might be sending your friends from China some very cryptic birthday messages.  Either way though, I think that this would be a great way to avoid a daily and painful facebook process, while still including the necessary personal touch.

I propose a new version of the Turing Test, if you can write your automatic facebook birthday messages without anyone noticing that you aren’t actually doing shit, then you’ve created an intelligent machine…you monster!