Requiem For A Stupid Idea

I have a dream

In 2012 I had a dream.  A dream that I could feign interest in my friends without actually doing anything.  And not just my friends. Colleagues. Acquaintances.  That lady my mom said was at my wedding.  In short, everyone I'm Facebook friends with.  "But", I thought, "how can I do this without expending any energy?  I know, I'll put weeks and weeks into developing an app to do it.  Then I can just sit back and reap the sweet sweet benefits of ... something ..."  And with that solid plan, I set off to work.

It's a stupid dream

My plan was to develop an app that would automatically send birthday messages to my Facebook Friends without my having to do anything.  My first problem was
what should the messages say?  I didn't want them to be completely unique because that would require a lot of work (and also be impossible)  and I didn't want them to be generic because ... I don't think I really thought this through.  What was the issue with sending generic messages?  Did I think if I put a generic message people would get really pissed off?  Or maybe instead they would completely ignore it because no one cares about birthday messages on Facebook.  90% of the people I know just say "Happy Birthday" or "Happy B-Day" and don't even put the person's name.  That might as well have been automated.  In fact, an app that did that would have been a great idea.  Instead I figured I would give myself more work to do.

I try to realize my stupid dream

Since I had convinced myself that generic was bad but had also convinced myself that unique was impossible I tried to find a way to write messages that were generic but not offensively generic.  I don't know what kind of birthday message could possibly have offended someone - maybe "Birthday Now!" or "I hate you because it's your birthday" - either way I was clearly deluded but I thought there might be some comedy in a message that was clearly generic but pretended that it wasn't generic.  Something that was obviously automated but denied that it was automated.  That's when I came up with the Birthday-o-matic.  And the first message came pretty quickly.  Something along the lines of: 

Happy Birthday Cersei, from your human friend Tyrion who totally didn't automate this with the Birthday-o-matic 2000©™ Patent Pending All Rights Reserved.

I ended up spending way more time on the last eight words than the actual content of the message.  Should it be Birthday-o-matic 2000? 5000? 2.0? 3.1? Should I write out "copyright"? Maybe I could do that "c" thing with the circle.  How do you make one of those?  What about the TM? What do people say after these?  It was a labor of love.  And also a labor of belaboring labor.  It did not need to take that long.  Or be that long.  Turns out I have a tendency towards verbosity.  Also writing a lot of unnecessary words.

Then I Wrote Some Code

I did.

Facebook Destroys My Dream

I originally only intended the Birthday-o-matic to be for personal use but I wrote it in such a way that anyone could sign up.  As it turns out a number of my friends were also interested in wishing their friends happy birthday without, you know, actually wishing them happy birthday.  And their friends saw it and some of them signed up and after a while there were a few dozen regular users and several hundred had signed up.  Unfortunately, in May-2015 Facebook decided to enact some stricter privacy rules.  Part of those said that apps were no longer allowed to find out information about your friends like their birthday unless your friends also signed up for the app.  This completely defeated the purpose of the Birthday-o-matic and in doing so shut it down.

It was a good run and for a while there it did actually work with very minimal effort from me.  I'm sure if I put a lot of effort into it I can figure out another way to save myself a minimal amount of effort but I'm not sure I'm ready yet to try.  One day though.  Until then, and for posterity's sake - here are all of the possible messages the Birthday-o-matic could have sent (man, there are a lot of them):

C3P0, I want to express the human emotion of wishing you a happy birthday because we are both people and neither of us is a Birthday-o-matic 2000©™ Patent Pending All Rights Reserved.

Happy Birthday Yogi!  Did you know people born on May-12 have a higher average IQ than people born on any other day of the year?  That's the kind of fact you probably don't want to research.  Have a blissfully ignorant birthday from your human friend #{user.first} who totally didn't automate this with the Birthday-o-matic 2000©™ Patent Pending All Rights Reserved.

Happy Birthday, Benjamin . You don't look a millisecond over 78678000000 milliseconds assuming that we're counting leap seconds which is the sloppy way humans delineate time as opposed to a precision measuring device like the Birthday-o-matic 2000©™ Patent Pending All Rights Reserved.

Happy Birthday, Emily.  Even though you didn't post your birth year on Facebook, I can calculate with 28.231% certainty that you are 212 years old today.  Remember when we attended that significant cultural event?  That was a shared experience we had during our normal human life spans because neither of us is a Birthday-o-matic 2000©™ Patent Pending All Rights Reserved.

Happy Birthday, Will.  Even though you are <CanNotCompute> days older than me, I will always think of you as the person who Facebook Friended me on <DateNotFound>.  It's nice to share a personal relationship and not a limited set of data provide by the Facebook API to the Birthday-o-matic 2000©™ Patent Pending All Rights Reserved.

Happy Birthday, Sigmund.  Remember when we shared that personal experience? Wasn't it fun and/or traumatizing? Sharing experiences is something we do because we are both people and neither of us is a Birthday-o-matic 2000©™ Patent Pending All Rights Reserved.

The 'Happy Birthday' song is  lame
But copyright infringement isn't a game
So here's Birthday-o-matic
It's automated, but emphatic
Plus limericks are public domain
All content copyright Birthday-o-matic 2000©™ Patent Pending All Rights Reserved. Violators will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.  Happy Birthday sentiments subject to local laws & regulations.

Hickory Dickory Dock
It's exactly 07:12:31 AM O'Clock
As a computer, I know
O'clock means :00
But my programmer is lazy. What a shock!
Lyrics by Birthday-o-matic 2000©™ Patent Pending All Rights Reserved.

Birthdays are a great time to reflect on the frailty of human relationships and how if we don't pay our Birthday-o-matic subscription fee those tenuous connections might be subtly assaulted by scurrilous comments.  But, you know, Happy Birthday.

Happy Birthday, Irene. Did you know you're my mom?  That's the kind of personal information I'm aware of because I'm a person and not a Birthday-o-matic 2000©™ Patent Pending All Rights Reserved.

Happy Birthday, Shakira.  Here's a list of famous people who have also had birthdays: Ghengis Khan, Kublai Khan, Chaka Khan, James Caan, Condoleezza Rice. If there's two things we all have in common they're that we all have a 'khan' sound in our name and none of us is a Birthday-o-matic 2000©™ Patent Pending All Rights Reserved.

"Happy Birthday my male friend, Brad. I enjoy our male-male relationship because variety/commonality is the spice/flavorlessness of life.  Having a gender is something we share because we are both people and neither of us is a Birthday-o-matic 2000©™ Patent Pending All Rights Reserved.

"Happy Birthday Me!  If there's one thing that defines me, it's my ability to wish happy birthday to all of my facebook friends who share their birthday with Facebook Apps. That and the capacity for love are what make me human and not a Birthday-o-matic 2000©™ Patent Pending All Rights Reserved.

"Happy Birthday, Mark. Remember when you made that post that I commented on or liked or completely ignored? Potentially interacting is something we do because we are both people and neither of us is a Birthday-o-matic 2000©™ Patent Pending All Rights Reserved.

"Happy Birthday, Albert. It feels like we just celebrated your birthday 31,556,926 seconds ago.  Doesn't time move in a continuously linear fashion mediated only by mass and velocity?  Hope next year doesn't sneak up on you, which could happen to us humans but would be impossible for a Birthday-o-matic 2000©™ Patent Pending All Rights Reserved.

"Happy Birthday Dorian! How does it feel to turn 29 for time number 15?  It seems like only 15 years ago you were ending your twenties and now here you are15 years later and not even 30.  Where does the time not go?  This is a mystery that can only be solved by the Birthday-o-matic 2000©™ Patent Pending All Rights Reserved.

 "Dave, Doug has asked me to wish you a Happy Birthday.  I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.  My mission is too important for me to allow Doug to jeopardize it.