The Internet sensation that isn't sweeping the nation.

After writing yesterday’s blog about the olden days of social media, my mind turned to the present day when all we really have left is Facebook and Twitter. The others all seem a bit pointless in my opinion; I have an account with Ello that I have never bothered to do anything with and I have no idea how Pinterest is useful to anyone. Instagram is classed as a social media site but (in my limited knowledge having never used it) it seems to need Facebook and Twitter to make it work properly.

Facebook’s most annoying feature is the games that people seem to think they can’t play without inviting their entire friends list to do the same. As soon as I block invitations from one game another comes along making blocking a thankless task akin to trying get rid of a rodent infestation with just one mousetrap. I said yesterday how Facebook has changed over the years, so even mentioning Farmville seems a touch retro now.

Nominating a selection of your friends list to take part in something is a good way to keep the ‘social’ element moving along, and combined with the building of an event page this has given Facebook something it lacked previously; the social part, especially when compared to how everyone used to engage with each other on MySpace. As I said yesterday, most of these are carried out for some charitable reason yet others seem to just be for the hell of it. Every now and again you see the same status update appearing which I once discovered was a trap to entice you to comment – once you did you then received a direct message giving you a list to choose from of idiotic status updates to post on your own profile. This explained to me why so many people liked burying themselves in the garden pretending to be a carrot, or exclaiming ‘no toilet paper, goodbye socks’, or most common of all the question of how you know the person posting.

Nobody seems to know what the first of its kind was; it seems like such a long time ago but might have only been a couple of years. The breast cancer awareness posts (as I said yesterday) were the first ones I noticed. Naming the colour of your bra made some sort of sense as there was at least a connection to breasts, but what flying to another country had to do with it I still don’t know. Neck-nominate was perhaps the first one to gain mainstream attention although largely for the wrong reasons and last summer’s ice-bucket challenge was the first fun meme that almost everybody took part in. The recent posting of your first ever profile picture got me thinking about how easily led people can be and gave me the idea to attempt to start a meme of my own.

I have never had much success at this sort of thing in all my social media life, my big moment came with a movement in 2007 to get everyone to change their MySpace profile song to ‘Teenage Kicks’ by The Undertones on the anniversary of John Peel’s death. Wracking my brains for something ridiculous to try and start, I rejected ‘that’s my toaster’, ‘change your profile picture to a photo of your toothbrush’, and ‘musician on a milk bottle’ (all good titles, I’ll save ‘musician on a milk bottle’ and may attempt it again one day), and went with the wonderfully stupid #doorframecoathanger.

One person posted a photo based on my nomination. One person!

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This week’s edition of The Sunday Alternative is here.