Don’t get ‘Face-Booked’.

‘One is often lost for words’.

It is a nice expression but apart from the dumb being lost for words and perhaps the catatonically depressed, it is not true for most of us. Surely those that can speak have words to say? I know that in the world of IT and SMS many words are now at risk of disappearing. Scores are lining up and join the club of text and twitter (TnT). A  new language has been born, almost overnight. We now do ‘lol and Rolf’ with the best of them. We are anxious and forever on our qui vive,  not to be seen as total IT oafs and risk being left behind.

My new mobile has a most irritating habit of giving complete words when texting a message in letters. Boy, did I get close disemboweling myself while Rolfing on the floor with this predictive texting. How do people know all those ways of setting the technical boundaries on their equipment? With the new mobile which I thought was about the simplest one can buy, there are still too many features. It would lock when not in use. The instructions to unlock were mysterious because it would abbreviate without explaining what the abbreviations stood for. This is another source for hurling the cat around. Why is so much now abbreviated? Is there something wrong with a word that is complete?

The irony of texting giving complete words when one just wants to write a single letter gets completely lost on the TnT (text ‘n twitter) aficionados when they  go and twitter using single letters almost exclusively or, at best abbreviated abbreviations. I must confess though, I too have become entangled betwixt text and twitter. Yet, I am not bored, just old and short tempered with abbreviations; it doesn’t help anyone with looming Alzheimer  to try and deal with de-ciphering ‘http, cred, FSG Cdis and F.offs including 2finger etc. We all know that Twitter only accepts 140 characters including punctuation, dicritals and periodos. To say the most with the least is the Art of tweeting. Some tweets have been so succinct they have made their writers instant millionaires.

Not so lucky are those that piled into Face-book shares. With the price on day of listing at $38US they are now trading at $26.72, that’s  down 30%. Right now we are witnessing the birth of a new verb and it is ‘to face-book’. Many claim to have fallen victim and have been fatally ‘face-booked’. It means to have been lulled into something by mass hysteria.

The fanfare surrounding Face-Book listing was the culprit. The reality was so obvious and so clear, to stay away from the public listing, but many could not resist the hoopla and wanted but wasted a lot of money. Face-book’s clientele of 900 million spend about a $ 1.70 a day per person. Now compared with Amazon which clocks in at $ 32.50 per person, it makes the Face book share not much more worth than $ 7.50 per share. The market is betting that Face Book (FB) is going down with put options outpacing call options. A put option is an option whereby you sell at the present price but don’t settle till a later date hoping the price has gone down so your settlement amount is less than when you sold them for the higher price.  A call option is the opposite and bullish in nature.

I don’t know why I went off at a tangent into the share market but there you are, take it or leave it.

At least I still have words and so far have avoided having been ‘Face-Booked.’