The stupidest game on Facebook

and you don’t need to install any app for it.

While contemplating the most watched icons on Facebook, it became obvious to me that this was an actual Facebook score. I’ve always believed Facebook is a game. And therefore, it should not be taken seriously. Any other use of Facebook would be foolish.

So these icons, well placed on the top right corner of the window, just like in video games, are supposed to give you information, but they mainly only invite you to click. For those not on Facebook, the left one is for “pending friend requests”, the middle one is for “unread private messages” and the one on the right is for “unread notifications”. That last one behaves more as a garbage collector because there is a lot of different kind of notifications. It can be comments, likes, game notifications, tagging, etc.

The trick with these icons is once you click on them, it resets the counter. It doesn’t mean you have read the notifications or that you replied to all your messages or that you responded to all the friend requests. No. It resets because you clicked on them.

Another thing to note is that the counter for each of these icons stops at 99 or 99+. There’s an end to it. Beyond 99 friend requests, private messages or notifications, is not worth counting. Why? Why not 999, 9999…? I sometimes have my mailbox or my RSS reader saying 157 unread messages. But no, not on Facebook.

Anyway, this led me to start a game. A stupid one I admit. The game of “not clicking” (looking at you reddit). I promised myself not to click on those icons until they reach their maximum. And I dare you to do the same.

So far, the easy part was getting friend requests and notifications up to the top. Now, I’m slowly waiting for the private messages to come in. A little more than 20 to go. I did screw up two weeks ago when reaching 42, I clicked on the chat window to respond to a friend. That also resets the counter… But thanks to friend support and announcing publicly what I was playing, things got back on track.

If you want to play along, just take a screenshot of those notifications icons and post a message with the hastag #FacebookHighscore

Let’s see if Facebook breaks when we all reach: 99+, 99+, 99+.