People Who Like "The Solipsist" Also Like Hedgehogs

One of the more charming--or patently annoying--features of Facebook is its recommendations. These appear on the right-hand side of one's homepage, or "wall." At first, these recommendations consisted of potential friends--presumably, friends of one's other Facebook friends, with whom one might possibly wish to initiate a friendship--or, more properly, a "friendship."

We've never actually taken one of these friendship recommendations. We figure anyone we want to befriend will actually BE a friend, and we choose to ignore Facebook's algorithmic matchmaking. Still we can understand how this feature might appeal to diehard social networkers who obsessively collect friends the way some people obsessively collect novelty salt shakers.

Subsequently, we began noticing recommendations for movie and TV and music pages: We received these notifications because of things that we had posted on our profiles. So, for example, because we had indicated that we enjoyed the movie "Goodfellas," we received an invitation to "like" "The Godfather": A picture of Vito Corleone, captioned with the information, "People who like 'Goodfellas' also like 'The Godfather.'" Well, duh! We don't know what sort of reward one would get for "liking" additional movies, but we suspect it would not be worth our time to find out.

The latest iteration of recommendations, though, focuses on those things we've indicated as "interests." Thus, we receive notifications like, "People who like reading" (like the Solipsist) "also enjoy walking." Now, (A), we find this recommendation questionable at best: We think people who like reading probably enjoy sitting rather more than walking. But, (2), we fear that Facebook is getting rather desperate for things with which to clutter one's wall: First, people; then, fansites; now, gerunds.

What's next? People who have birthdays also like breathing?