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As I’m now at a relatively high level in Mob Wars, I’ve found myself becoming a minnow even with over 100 mob members to back me up in fights. Most others have 200-500+ members in their mob, making them hard to beat.

Thus, when I do see someone with a smaller mob size, I attack them so my win-lose stats don’t look so bad. My policy is never to attack the smaller guys more than twice in a row, even if it gets more lots of money, because I feel it’s cruel enough already :P

However, this dude seemed particularly upset at his loss(es) to me and was hell-bent on attacking me back. Just that his mob was particularly puny and each attack drastically reduced his health points. Duh.

It was so amusing, I haven’t attacked him again because I pity him/her.

Later on, I read in a girls-only Mob Wars forum (yes, the game has evolved to that stage) on how you could attack yourself and go to Hospital, because then you’re protected for several hours as your health points recover. During this period, nobody can attack you and get the money you’re making from property rentals. This is handy if you’re going to buy large chunks of the city and not want to lose 10% by depositing it in the Bank first.

Very interesting game, but I’ll have to abandon it soon…

Dr Andy drew my attention to this cool Friend Wheel generator on Facebook. It processes your list of friends into a wheel, drawing lines of connection to each other to form a beautiful chart. Friends’ names are coloured according to how ‘hot’ or cold they are in terms of interlinks.

I tried it out for myself:

I guess I have a happy problem of having too many friends on Facebook. I re-generated it, this time with the largest resolution possible:

(Warning: The original is almost 5MB in size)

But the analysis is interesting. From there I can see huge webs of interlinking between different groups of friends. Colleagues, of course, are all linked to each other. Local social media and PR experts, bloggers, folks from The Digital Movement are all linked to each other, as they should be ;-) Some of you are quite ‘happening’ as there are so many lines around your names, the lines coagulated into solid patches of colour!

Two new groups have recently emerged as major blocs on my Friends list, also heavily intertwined on my Friend web. Firstly, there is the INSEAD group. We should jolly well be connected to each other, since we are going to suffer/study/party together for 10 months straight!

Secondly, there is my new network of Facebook gamers. We have to add each other as Friends to build up our own armies or mobs. But that is getting to be a big distraction and time-waster so I am contemplating quitting Mob Wars before I start school.

Also, the system randomly picks 600 friends so please don’t mind if you’ve been left out! You can choose to generate Friend Wheels within certain networks, but since my current networks are only for ‘Singapore’ and my university, it will either be too vast or too narrow a range.

Anyway, if you’re on Facebook you can get your own. Have fun!

This is the most fascinating colour chart I’ve received since my eyeballs’ contours were scanned in preparation for LASIK …

As some of my good friends know, I’m addicted to Mob Wars on Facebook. It’s become a bit less exciting now that I’ve bought every weapon and property that can be bought. It is also not very fun getting my ass whipped as I progress to the higher levels because almost everyone there has a few hundred people in their mob and are winning through sheer numbers.

There’s very little strategy to the game apart from making lots of money and signing up mindless numbers of strangers as friends, so you can increase your mob size. When mob sizes are close to mine, I make educated guesses based on their statistics before deciding whether to attack them. Sometimes, when someone too powerful hits me many times, I put them on the hit list and get some bigger mobster to whack them for dead.

Anyway, I am pleased to report that I have done in Mob Wars what Jesus has done for the rest of us believers … killed Eternal Darkness.

What a name! There are weirder names about, and some rather misogynistic ones too. All the more I want to wallop these guys provided my mob is big enough.

ps. If you are playing Mob Wars too, do join my mob!

So it seems that a second friend has had her Facebook account broken into. I urge everyone not to list any personal details on their profiles, such as your email address and mother’s maiden name. If you haven’t logged in recently, do so just to make sure everything’s OK. Both my friends hadn’t logged into Facebook for a while, and didn’t realise what was happening immediately.

My friend told me that the only thing she recalled clicking on recently was Facebook Chat. I thought that couldn’t be possible, because that is an official Facebook feature. However, my Facebook Chat appeared at the bottom right corner of my screen, while hers was on top. When she clicked on it, apparently nothing happened. When I clicked on mine, I started chatting to my Facebook friends.

So now I have a question for my readers: If you’ve got Facebook Chat enabled, is your Chat window at the top or bottom right corner? Let’s get to the bottom of this.

Seems that there is Facebook hacking and spamming going on. The situation is still unfolding, but one of my Facebook contacts started posting penis enlargment messages on my wall.

As she is usually quite professional, I figured her account got hacked. So did some of her friends. Then I did a search and turns out there is an ongoing discussion on Facebook regarding exactly this penis enlargement message.

Whoever is doing it are dickheads, and the community should go to great lengths to catch the perpetrators.

I’m making guesses now, but if you get the same message, do NOT visit the URL mentioned because it probably somehow breaks into your Facebook account, which you’d presumably be logged into at that point in time.

Any more updates on this, post them as a comment here. Thanks!

Want to find out which are the hottest buzzwords on Facebook? Check out Lexicon, which was launched on 15 April 2008.

Lexicon counts occurrences of words and phrases on Facebook Walls, over time. I made a few searches.

Not surprisingly, “Obama” appears more frequently than “Clinton.

The sharp spikes make sense as they corresponded with interest in the Democratic primaries and caucuses, particularly Super Tuesday (5 Feb 2008) which accounts for the highest peak so far.

For targetted marketing, it would be better if we could narrow our searches further, within specific networks - such as Facebook users in the Singapore network. It’s good to think global, but sometimes words and phrases have different meanings in different cultures.

Also, while Lexicon indicates what Facebook users are interested in, it doesn’t indicate if people are for or against it. A keyword could appear many times but what if Facebook users were talking about a campaign AGAINST it? I have yet to prove my case, though, as there were no results for the phrase ‘child porn’ and limited results for ‘pornography’.

In the meantime, we can at least assure ourselves that even on Facebook, Love is all around.

I hear Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg (limited profile) get loads of Facebook friend requests.

On the other end of the spectrum, the average Joe probably has a smaller list of people whom he actually knows. He doesn’t add anyone he doesn’t know. That’s straightforward.

For the rest of us, somewhere in between, we may have requested friendships of people whom we don’t know personally (famous or not). Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington is my Facebook friend though we’ve never met before, because he invited all his readers to add him as one. So I did.