Facebook works!

A couple of weeks ago I got exasperated when those silly jiggling advertisements saying "You are the 999 999 visitor. This is no joke" invaded Facebook as well.

Some months ago I blogged about it here: Notes from underground: You are the 999999th 999999th visitor, but that had little effect

I'd seen them on Technorati, on Photobucket, and on several other places in the web. But seeing them on Facebook was too much.

I started a Facebook group called You are the 999999th 999999th visitor -- this is not a joke!, which gathered 5 members. It pointed out that such ads were an insult to the intelligence of anyone who read them. The moment you saw any of them twice, you'd have to be very stupid indeed not to realise that it was untrue, and if it wasn't a joke it was a very stupid lie.

Guess what -- within two days, the ads had stopped.

Well, they'd stopped saying "You are the 999999th visitor" or "Your are the 10000th visitor". They used other more plausible numbers.

I still don't click on them, though, because I still find it annoying that they jiggle.

But I'm impressed by the power of public opinion -- all five of us. You know who you are. See, Barack Obama is right - Yes we can!

You are the 999999th 999999th visitor

Just about every time I go to the Technorati site nowadays I see an all-flashing, all-squiggling, all-jiggling message saying "You are the 999999th visitor" or "This is not a joke -- you are the 10000th visitor".

These ads also appear on several other web sites.

The most annoying thing about them is not just that they jiggle and squiggle, though that is bad enough, and makes me want to leave the page as quickly as possible.


It is not just the obvious untruth. Well, "This is not a joke" is actually true, because it is indeed very unfunny.

But it is the gratuitous insult to the intelligence of readers of the page.

Do Technorati or Photobucket (to name just two) really think that we are so stupid that we will not notice that if we were the 10000th visitor last time, then we must be the 10001st visitor next time, even if there were no other visitors to the site in between? How many 999999th visitors can they have? And how can one be the 10000th 999999th visitor? I'm sure I must be the 999999th 999999th visitor.

If they value visitors to their sites, why do they allow them to be insulted in this way every time they visit?

I realise that they need to have ads to make money, but do they really need to have ads that insult and annoy their visitors like this?