Word: patch
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...started innocently enough: last month a friend sent me a virtual lily plant on Facebook and invited me to create a (Lil) Green Patch, a digital garden that would grow on my profile page, and that any of my friends could help water, weed and plant. Sounds cute, right? Not if you've recently suffered through an overwhelming slew of requests to give a grain of rice, send good karma and rate your friends on everything including their hotness, creativity, fashion sense and intelligence. I wasn't merely skeptical - I was annoyed. But I didn't want...
That is the moment I became part of Facebook's fastest-growing problem: application overload, a.k.a. Facebook fatigue. Like thousands of users before me, I started spamming my friends with requests to grow Green Patches of their own. When they did, I bombarded them with more plants and decorations for their gardens. (Lil) Green Patch is one of the 15 most popular add-on applications on Facebook, according to Adonomics.com, and it has more than 350,000 active users. It's also just one of thousands of viral apps that require you to invite your friends to participate in order...
...people spam their friends even though most people hate it? I could claim I was motivated by altruism - proceeds from the ad revenue generated by the (Lil) Green Patch go toward saving the rainforest - but the truth is that I just wanted to grow my garden and see how many different kinds of plants I could send and receive. If I send 1,000 plants I earn a garden gnome. Cool! (By Green Patch's own statistics, the application has contributed a mere $15,650 toward its stated cause since launching in December...
...program defaulted to sending the posting to everyone. "I still shudder over that one," she says. And because advertisements are slickly intertwined with the apps - they often use the exact same font and graphics - it's easy to inadvertently click one by mistake. David King, CEO of Green Patch in San Mateo, Calif., says about 5% of the hundred or so e-mails his company receives from users each day are from people who are "confused...
...only up to a point. The effects triggered by chronically elevated levels of testosterone can eventually have the opposite effect. Animals observed in this same situation by scientists start to pick fights they ought to avoid, or to patrol a wider, more hazardous patch of territory. Perception of risk becomes blurred. For a trader on a roll in the midst of a bubble, for instance, that suggests "several rounds of winning means testosterone so high they start taking stupid risks," says John Coates, a former Wall Street trader turned senior research fellow at Cambridge, and lead author of the study...