Consider this a social networking Public Service Announcement:

Funny that this song (by @thefavorites, follow them!) comes up after a discussion with a friend of mine ( @tintri ) regarding Facebook status updates. Generally, I imagine most people don't care what I have to say. I try not to compound that by whining incessantly about everything going on. Ok maybe I do, but I at least try to make it entertaining in some way for the 3 people actually reading.

Like a lot of people, I tend to deal with adversity with humor, defense mechanism type thing, but then again I'm normally joking all the time anyway, so there's no real difference. Not that I really care about this sort of thing, but I an guarantee you if I started posting "I can't believe this is happening to me" or a similar type of message every few days, I'll probably end up losing about 300% of my Twitter followers. Yes, I will be at -600 followers. No one wants to deal with a whiner. Much less a vague whiner.

I've seen this type of thing joked about before, on Facebook, by @chancekear, @fbullington, and @the_raheel. They spent a day posting vague messages fishing for sympathy on their Facebook profiles, and see how many responses they could get. It was pretty entertaining, obviously knowing what they were doing. It's great knowing you have friends that will at least attempt to sympathize about things, but well, they'll eventually grow tired of it as well. To me, you're taking advantage of your friends sympathy.

I'm not saying you can't use Facebook or Twitter as a way to express what you're thinking/feeling at the moment. That's kind of the entire reason for the existence of these types of things. Fishing for sympathy though, is essentially the social networking equivalent of flopping in a basketball or soccer game. You don't want to be compared to Andrei Kirilenko or every player on the Mexican national soccer team, do you? Didn't think so. If you have something bothering you and you're willing to make it public, make it completely public and at least give details on what's going on, so we can determine whether sympathy is needed, or if it's just that you found out Butler busted your bracket.

"I can't believe it. Why do these things happen?" or "Wow, Sparky (my dog) just had to be put down. RIP"

Both are about the same length, yet one expresses exactly what the problem is. If this is the case, and stuff like this happens to you twice a week, then well, I apologize in advance. I can't believe that it is the case though. I imagine most of the time it's just fishing for attention, but that's beside the point. Either way, much like every big playoff game or tournament game, the saying always fits. "Go big or go home." In other words, if you're going to complain publicly, have a reason, and give that reason.