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What’s the best part of the Sunday paper? The comics. What’s the worst part of your Facebook feed these days? The freakin’ comics. Bitstrips have successfully pissed off three times as many people as they’ve amused. Facebook claims that the Bitstrips app is used by over 5 million people, and so far I have yet to read a single positive thing about them.
In case you’ve been lucky enough to avoid the Bitstrips phenomenon, allow me to fill you in. Bitstrips is an app which allows users to create a comic-like, idealized avatar for themselves. This allows users to comically update Facebook friends on the happenings of life, instead of using plain old words.
The only reason I can think of for why this app caught on, is that it is, at the very least, a new way to waste time. There are lots of other ways I would choose to waste time, but this one seems to have caught on with over 5 million people.
Bitstrips CEO Jacob Blackstock has said that Bitstrips is “hard to categorize because it’s not a game. It’s a new way to express yourself and interact with your friends. Instead of posting the same things as everyone else, you can create something that relates to your life.”
In May, Blackstock told NPR that 92% of Bitstrips users were teens and young adults. Kids these days…
Since Facebook is apparently for old people now, we can rest assured that these teenagers who are driving the Bitstrips app will get easily distracted with something else once their ADD meds wear off. Hopefully once they lose interest next week, everyone else will follow.
As with any big trend, it’s coolest when it’s not TOO popular and just enough people know about it to make it an overgrown inside joke. Now that it’s a large enough trend to piss people off and make the news, it will most likely fade as quickly as it appeared. As long as my mother doesn’t find out about it before it fades, I’m in good shape.
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Spaceman Spiff
Now a graduate with a few years of business "experience", Spiff didn't exactly turn into the interplanetary explorer extraordinaire he had hoped to become. Instead, he spends his days as a cynical desk jockey, moonlighting as a Contributing Writer for PGP and marching ever closer to the big 3-0, which has only fueled his transition from quarter-life crisis straight into thrisis.
At one point there were 8 straight friends in my feed that posted one of this bitstrips. I haven’t logged back in since. Please send an updated column when this trend is officially dead.
This is almost as bad as the “what ____ thinks I do / what I really do” meme that was going around a couple years ago. People need to understand that basically no one, even your own friends and family, gives a rat’s ass what you do at work on a day to day basis. They don’t have a misconception about how glamorous your job is or isn’t because they don’t think about it in the first place.
Lighten up people, they’re comics. Facebook is for everyone. I love how the people that bitch about bitstrips are the ones who post political rants, pictures of what they had for dinner, and all of their negative opinions. Scroll past it and move on. Look into yourself and think, “why does this irritate me…why”? Sheesh.
I have a control group of friends on facebook. once they pick up on some trend, that trend is officially a dead horse beaten to the point of mutilation.