Ahh, the holiday season is upon us: People have begun bargain hunting, department stores are donning premature decorations, turkeys are being shot to death, and email inboxes everywhere are being graced with season-appropriate promotional materials so absurd, one might think they were actually written by the clinically insane.
I received one such email earlier this week from the suspicious, Yoda-esque alias PartyWeDo. The subject line: "An Internet Full of Gift Thieves. A White Elephant Gift Swap on Facebook."
Hoo boy. I knew I was in for it. But I realized how serious the situation was when I saw the press release came from something called MyPRGenie -- a.k.a., a site for do-it-yourself PR. Like a self-publishing outlet, but for the worst product ideas of the century.
That's exactly what PartyWeDo's upcoming Facebook application called "AlbinoPhant" is: the absolute worst thing I've heard about in 100 years... 100!
Here's some text from the release:
This Facebook application allows family and friends the opportunity to party together in a virtual gift exchange, just like they would if gathered together in one location. They exchange real gifts, share friendly banter and enjoy the holiday spirit, through the online party.
Gift exchange parties are social events that focus on sharing gifts with family and friends and then "stealing" gifts from one another in an organized party game.
Groan.
As if the recent noise over Farmville -- a collaborative Facebook application through which people help each other raise farms (what!) -- wasn't insane enough, more people have come up with new ways to interact with one another on Facebook in a wholly unproductive manner. But this time... it's tied to the holidays.
And what goes better with the holidays than spending money on frivolous throwaways? The purpose of AlbinoPhant is to have a virtual "White Elephant" party with a group of people, through which participants buy gifts on Amazon.com (from $15-$50), virtually wrap them, virtually discuss them, and virtually steal them from one another.
"When all of the gifts are virtually wrapped, opened, discussed, stolen and re-stolen, the game ends," states the release. "The application's management system then sorts out who gets which real gift and sees that each present is delivered to the correct address."
That's the only consolation here with AlbinoPhant: At the end of it, everybody gets a gift in the mail. But unless that gift is a new family -- whose priorities don't revolve around playing holiday games on the Internet -- I'd consider it lost time.
Oh well. As I always say: Nothing quite says "Happy Holidays" like a do-it-yourself PR firm and stealing (and re-stealing) presents from family on Facebook. Just add this silliness to the list of many more mistletoe-wrapped inanities and marketing gimmicks to still cross our virtual paths.
"An Internet Full of Gift Thieves"? Not quite. Try "An Internet Full of Attention Thieves" -- and you might be a little closer to defining what's likely lurking in your email inbox and on social networks this holiday season.
— Nicole Ferraro, Site Editor, Internet Evolution
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