I Just Tagged You on Facebook

I have a problem.  Well, I have lots of problems, but I'm only going to talk about one today.

I think I'm annoying all my Facebook friends.  I have a compulsive need, and I just have to feed it.  The thing is, I really need your face to be tagged on Facebook.

This need has been with me a long time, basically since the inception of Facebook.

It started out relatively harmless.  When I posted pictures I would tag everyone in my pics.  It sometimes resulted in me friending really random people just because they showed up in the background of a picture I took and I really needed to tag them.  (Now you can tag people that aren't your friends but that hasn't always been the case.)

Then I started noticing other people would post photos and not tag anyone in them.  Can you believe this?  They would post pictures WITHOUT TAGGING ANYONE!?!?!?!

I know you're as outraged as me, but for the one person out there in cyberspace who doesn't understand how important this is, let me explain.  You see, I love data.  I love that Facebook has compiled all sorts of data on my friends.  I love that I can search things like, "Photos of my friends taken in Hawaii" and I can see awesome photos of people I know in the happiest place on Earth.  (Anyone who thinks the happiest place on Earth is Disneyland has clearly never been to Hawaii.)  Or maybe I want to see my family as they were growing up, and I search something like "Photos of my family before 1999".


The point is that there are lots of ways to view the data that Facebook has gathered, but the search is useless if faces aren't tagged.

My need to perfect the data has been with me a long time.  But, for a long time I was able to resist tagging other people's photos.  Then Facebook implemented a new feature.  Now it recognizes faces and directly asks me if I want to tag them.  It's one thing to not type your name in and tag your face, but to ignore a direct question is beyond my ability to resist.

So if you're one of those people that doesn't like yourself tagged, I'm sorry.  Mark Zuckerberg and I have formed an alliance and we are going to catalog who is in every picture.  I hope you're not too annoyed.  I hope we can still be friends.