US News

Facebook app lets users bored of friending name their enemies

Although Facebook has more than its share of detractors, there is not much of a way to express negative emotions on the website.

You can only have “friends” and “like” what they say and do.

Into the breach with EnemyGraph steps a team led by Dean Terry, described by PC Magazine as a “self-proclaimed transmedia artist and technologist.”

The purpose of EnemyGraph, according to its creators, is to run “dissonance queries” that run precisely counter to the attempts to quantify affinities between Facebook users run by the company itself.

Though Terry said his group’s intent was to create “a critique [of] the social philosophy of Facebook,” the EnemyGraph development team has discovered that “[t]he ironic thing is — and this is a byproduct of the project rather than the intention — we are generating a whole new set of personal data that could potentially be mined,” Terry wrote.

The idea is you can choose any Facebook entity — be it other individuals, companies, brands or places — and designate them an enemy.

EnemyGraph currently displays the top-listed enemies of users of the app, as well as “trending enemies” that users named frequently in recent days.

However, at the moment the app and website are suffering technical difficulties. It appears that the servers are being overwhelmed by the rapidly-growing popularity of EnemyGraph.

To read more, go to The Wall Street Journal