ThatsNonsense.com is 12 weeks, and craving Starburst

If you’re worried that us at ThatsNonsense.com have gone and gotten ourselves pregnant, you really needn’t be. The curiously worded title to this post is actually the result of the latest Facebook status “game”, and with hundreds of users posting a message like this every minute, it has truly gone viral.
Does anybody remember last year when women were posting single worded posts containing nothing but an isolated color to their Facebook statuses? For a good 24 hours it was driving the men mad, until the message being passed between the Facebook females was “outed” – the color was simply that of the bra the woman was wearing at the time. This latest craze is just a coded message to show the posters date of birth – the month deciding the number of weeks and the date deciding the object of the craving.

The really interesting point, however, is that these seemingly trivial tasks and messages highlight the epic extent to which social networking sites like Facebook can launch anything into cyberspace stardom. Who would have thought such an inconsequential message could attract the attention and compliance of so many Facebook users? These circulated messages actually show one fascinating and remarkable direction Facebook is taking – not just a site to socialize with friends, but a tool to carry messages to a global audience in minutes. A marketing dream, and an alarming demonstration of the sheer power Facebook have harnessed.

Of course, on a more serious note, even though these messages are harmless and have only drawn minimum controversy (some Facebook users believe posting messages implying you are pregnant is irresponsible) we should be aware that if a message like this can travel the online digital world so fast, so can its more malicious counterparts.
So have your fun ladies, but when it comes to clicking links, installing Facebook applications or sharing pages, exercise extreme caution. Scammers use the social nature of Facebook everyday to propagate dangerous scams. The next Facebook status you make might not be so harmless.