You can’t turn around lately without hearing about the latest craze on facebook: 25 Random Things.  The premise is, you put up 25 random and usually useless things about yourself, and then “tag” a bunch of people so that they can come read it and praise you for the witty and interesting things you have to say.

I am a bit p[icky when it comes to what shows up in my email box, so when a Facebook application sends me a message without my explicit approval, I report it for sending spam and then block it.  The problem is, this isn’t an application.  It’s a note, or something, and you can arbitrarily tag people.

The first time this happened it was my sister, and I scoured her 25 Random Things looking for where she mentioned me, even indirectly.  There was no mention of me. Until now, “tagging” me usually meant I was in a photo, and I was happy to receive notification of a 3rd party putting information about me on the internet.  Thats a good use of notification.

I went to my Facebook privacy settings and found that there was a setting to disable email notification when someone tags you in a note.  That would be fine… until someone wrote something about me in a note and tagged me, and then I would have no idea.

So, users are violating the spirit of what tagging is supposed to be used for, which is hardly Facebook’s fault.  But it still annoys me.I suppose I will not have to live with two flavors of chain letter style spam, one from traditional email, and one from facebook.  Facebook should step up and find a way to solve this problem though, without forcing me to blanket deny all communications from them.