The Great Poke Experiment

I may be the most bored person on this planet. Despite the fact that I went to dinner and bowling, drove to Wilmington, DE and back, and then rocked it out at a Lykke Li concert this weekend, I came home  to boredom on Sunday night. And so I did what most bored people do: FACEBOOK.

Then, my roommate asked me to poke her.

--PAUSE-- What is a poke? 

The poke feature is intended to be a "nudge" to attract the attention of another user. Many Facebook users use this feature to attract attention or say "hello" to their friends. --UNPAUSE--

My roommate wanted to see where the poke showed up on her page and if she would notice it. So I poked. "The poke is nothing" she said. I see her point, the poke is small and unobtrusive...nothing to write home about. So I said:

"Well, what if I poked all my friends on facebook?"

It seemed funny at the time, but I quickly discovered that this is a time-consuming undertaking. Crazy time-consuming. So much so, that I gave up.

So I randomly* poked 130 friends, and I must say, these are the following emotions I felt:

*It wasn't actually random, I just went in alphabetical order and gave up at a certain point.

1. Fear - Will people think I'm a weirdo? Will people be like: "Who is Kristen?" and de-friend me?! I PROMISE, we met at least ONCE!!!
2. Amusement - Some of the people I'm poking...I have NO business poking. And it's funny. Haha funny. But yet, sad boo-hoo  funny (ex-boyfriends, married people, girls that I had a falling out with, members of the clergy...smh)
3. Incredulity - I can't believe some of these people friended me in the first place! We haven't seen each other in like a decade.I also encountered the "this person has not responded to your last poke"notification. Wow! I haven't poked someone in ages. That means, that person is not on facebook any longer. An abandoned facebook page identified!

But, of all these, I mostly feel the fear. Do these people think I'm a nut-job? So with all experiments, there is a waiting period. I waited 3 days to see if anything would come of my "massive" poking experiment. This is what I expected:

• To lose a few friends. I started the experiment with 370.
• To get about 20% poke-backs, b/c some of those people are peeps that I'm decent friends with
• To get a large amount of ignores (like it never happened)
• And a few outliers. People who respond with a wall post or private message asking me questions about my life and/or about why I poked them.

What really happened is presented graphically below:

I won't lie, the results are a little...underwhelming. To summarize these findings, out of 130 friends, only 32 responded. 3 Responded with a DEFRIEND! Ouch! 2 people actually wrote me a little something in regards to the poke, in addition to joining 27 others in a friendly poke back. Ultimately, all my fears and worries were unfounded, as my roommate was correct:

The Poke is Nothing. 

I shall contact Mark Zuckerberg immediately so he can rid the site of this pointless feature.