FMS Ushers in New Era of Communication and Rivaly

Just got off the phone with my old friend Michael Torres (he is an old-fashioned guy who still uses "voice" to communicate) and despite his Internet 1.0 habits the man remains a genius! As I begged him to reconsider joining the borg of us on Facebook, and he refused for about the fourth time, he single-handedly coined the phrase "Friend Management System."

A proper FMS will allow one not only to keep instant tabs on the status of all friends, but to manage those friends as the Friend Owner deems appropriate. It's obvious that we'll each need to define classes of friends, so that we can provide differing levels of access and security. Rodger.bestfriend would be infinitely more powerful and all-seeing than Rodger.casualAcquaintance. Facebook is already doing some of this, but we'll need more...a lot more. I can see an entire hierarchy of relationships, with rankings awarded for witty comments or subtracted for watching and then commenting on, say, cooking reality shows. Instead of silly Facebook Snowball Fights, we can have Virtual Friend Warfare Systems in which all of us will compete to become and to retain the highest quality of friendship. Friend Recognition Systems will assembly entire armies to fight on our behalf, until our Avatars turn on the humans who created them and our rag-team fleet of Facebookers is forced out into the vastness of Internet 2.0 to seek a new home....

Well, you get the idea. And just remember: we all have ElTorro.bestfriend to thank, and we could all do it, too, if he would only join Facebook.