People who are using it for other reasons are making plonkers of themselves. Case in point il-Laburisti tal-massa: Jekk taqblu ma’ Silvio Parnis aghfsu l-buttuna ‘like’.

Having someone added as a FB contact means nothing in certain, if not most, cases. The term FB uses is ‘friend’, but that shouldn’t be taken literally in the context of any online social network, as I will explain. You can accept someone’s invitation to connect (thereby adding them as a ‘friend’ and they will show on your friend list and them on yours), but then you might make use of the quite granular and sophisticated privacy mechanism available on FB to restrict much of your content (status updates, material shared and links recommended, photos uploaded, etc.)

If Daphne had a FB profile under her name and she proceeds to add me as a ‘friend’ because we’ve done business together (we haven’t), we were introduced at a social gathering (we haven’t either), or she’s my new boss (ditto), I might feel pressured to add her back but I might elect not to grant her full access to my personal photos or personal status updates which I wouldn’t have shared with her otherwise.

In this sense, a FB friend invitation is in actual terms simply a request for permission to view the material you share. If there is no personal information uploaded on that account, or it’s deliberately withheld from certain individuals, then that ‘friendship’ has no real value to any of the parties and should be considered as such. Sorry to burst your bubble, but it’s no big deal if someone is on someone else’s friends list. It’s not like they’re on speed dial or something.

Just to give you an example, DJ Gianni, Ira Losco, and some other local celebrities (I use that term loosely) have well over 5,000+ ‘friends’ on Facebook and have had to create multiple profiles because FB previously capped the number of friends to 5,000 per profile. (This policy seems to have been relaxed.)

Lou Bondi’s profile has 5,266 friends at the last count. I very much doubt he can even recognise a good 90% of them if he had to walk past them in the street. Or if he could count on each of those 5,266 people if he ever got locked out of his place in the middle of the night.

So please learn to make that distinction.

Thank you,
The Internet

And it was free of charge, and the animal lovers could not complain.

“Will people still flock to the circus that Silvio Zammit is bringing over to Naxxar and Ghajnsielem?”

The circus came to town early this year.

I would have made an exception in his case.

A rare 400kg white tiger?

You bet.

Maybe it’ll get peckish and have his arm off.

Isn’t that a gross generalisation?

http://www.maltatoday.com.mt/en/newsdetails/news/national/Muscat-reiterates-that-Tonio-Borg-nomination-will-face-problems-over-anti-gay-statements-20121027

Alfred Sant nesa’ jghid li ‘hbieb tal-hbieb’ mhijiex xi kultura politika partikolari ghal PN biss imma hija kultura tal-politika ta’ Malta in generali.

Anki l-membri tal-partit ta’ Sant, mill-oppozizzjoni kienu jhaddnu din il-kultura, kif hareg car fil-kaz li irrapporta il-gurnalist tal-Independent Noel Grima fuq Dalli u Noel Farrugia (MP Labour) li gara fl-2004.

http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20121027/local/-Evidence-Dalli-knew-what-was-going-on-.442763