While most people tend to ignore Facebook’s friend suggestions, this Belgian student actually traveled all the way to Austin, Texas to meet up with a stranger just because the social network’s algorithm suggested they become friends!

24-year-old Victor Van Rossem was intrigued when Facebook displayed 49-year-old as a ‘suggested friend’, because they obviously had no connection other than a mutual acquaintance. “Facebook suggested we become friends, and I thought that was pretty absurd,” Victor said.

But as he spent time looking through Neal’s pictures, he became more and more interested in the artist’s life. “I became fascinated by him. He had a long beard and looked a little unusual. He did art performances and paintings of mythical creatures and strange beasts which only made me more interested in him.”

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It seems that all it takes to make the news these days is a social media account and a bizarre quest of some sort. Like this Australian man, who is making headlines with his quest to have coffee with all 1,088 of his Facebook friends. His project is called ‘1000+ Coffees’ and he describes it as “an exercise in remembering to socialize with and get to know people”.

“I plan to have a one-on-one coffee with every single one of my 1000+ Facebook friends over the space of the next three years, or as long as it takes to complete,” 28-year-old Matt Kulesza wrote on his Tumblr page. “I obviously don’t have 1,000 real-life friends. The point of the project is to see who these people actually are and get to know them.”

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25-year-old Zilla van den Born managed to fool her friends and family into believing that she was on a five-week vacation in South-East Asia, when, in reality, she was at home in Amsterdam the whole time, clicking seemingly authentic holiday photographs and putting them up on Facebook to create the illusion!

Zilla devised the elaborate lie as a part of her University project through which she wanted to show how Facebook status messages and photographs are not accurate indicators of real life. “I did this to show people that we filter and manipulate what we show on social media,” she explained. “Thereby we create an online ideal world which reality can no longer meet. My goal was to prove how common and easy it is to distort reality.”

“Everybody knows that pictures of models are manipulated. But we often overlook the fact that we manipulate reality also in our own lives,” she added, wisely.

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Some people just can’t seem to catch a break. Predrag Jovanovic, a single man from Serbia trying to find love online, hasn’t gotten a single positive response after contacting 5,000 different women on Facebook.

Desperate for love, the 34-year-old Serbian had turned to Facebook to find his soulmate. He sent individual messages to 5,000 different women, asking if they would consider being his girlfriend. Unfortunately, none of the responses were favourable. “I got only 15 responses and they were all negative,” he said. “All 15 politely refused to be my girlfriend, while the rest of them simply ignored me. When someone ignores you, that’s the worst thing of all.”

But Jovanovic hasn’t lost hope yet; he vows to continue his mission to find his perfect woman online. Well, he actually doesn’t have any other options, as most of the women in his tiny village (near Belgrade) are either married or grandmothers. He also said that he finds speaking to women online easier, owing to his shy nature. He admitted that he doesn’t laugh much, and that his behavior towards strangers can be stiff at times.

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25-year-old New Zealander, Reese McKee, started a social media campaign that fired the imagination of thousands of romantics on the internet. His plea for help in locating the whereabouts of his soul-mate went viral within hours. In fact, he had to delete the campaign because it all started to spiral out of control.

I’m not quite sure what to make of Reese – sweet romantic dude, or crazy internet stalker. Maybe I’ll let you be the judge of that. Here’s his story:

In his original campaign, Reese said that he met a girl on New Year’s Eve, 2012, in Hong Kong. He spotted her crying alone on the side of a road; she was lost and couldn’t find her friends. “I just cheered her up,” Reese said. “I sort of have this undeniably bad sense of humor that no one can resist laughing at.” The two spent the night partying, dancing and talking, before the girl caught up with her friends again. As they parted, she told Reese that her name was ‘Katie’ and she was from DC. She let him take a picture of her, and left with these final words: “Find Me.”

The next morning, as Reese looked at Katie’s photograph on his phone, a flood of great memories came back to him and he was determined to find her. Unfortunately, he couldn’t remember the e-mail address she’d given him, so he decided to turn to Facebook for help.

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A thousand roses, boxes of chocolates, diamond necklaces, expensive shoes and cars. These are just some of the many ways men have tried to earn their spouses’ forgiveness after having cheated on them. Meet Ivan Lewis, the cheater, and Sonya Gore, the mastermind behind her husband’s unique and very public display of affection.

Lewis and Gore got married in 2010 but split after only 10 months because of Lewis’ constant cheating. After some time apart, during which Lewis reflected on what he had done, the guy decided to put an end to his unfaithful ways and do everything in his power to get Gore to forgive him. On September 22, he proposed to her publicly on his Facebook wall. Although many people were touched by his gesture, Gore wasn’t too impressed. He then posted a picture of himself holding a piece of paper which read “I cheated on my wife!!! (and she was ugly!!!)”, stating that he needed 10,000 likes in order for Gore to take him back. His plea was generally well received but there was a good amount of criticism as well: “My man wouldn’t have to show and prove it on fb! So, I’m probably one on the number who wouldn’t care for that!!”, Facebook user Latoya Holiday wrote. “Well if she was ugly why’d you do it? Men always think the grass is greener on the other side, this is a lesson learned if she takes you back and if she does this should never come up again because once you forgive someone you can’t keep back tracking, move forward and keep God first, I hope yall make it work !” another user posted.

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Facebook, the world’s most popular social network, has just passed the 100 billion valuation mark, but thanks to a couple of business-savvy ice-cream makers from Croatia, anyone can have a slice of it for as little as 1 euro.

Brothers Admir and Ibi Adili run the Valentino ice cream shop in Tisnom, on Croatia’s Murter island. After noticing his 15-year-old daughter Bibi spent a lot of her free time on Facebook, Admir came up with the idea of creating a Facebook ice cream to attract other fans of the social network. All he had to do was make a plain white ice cream, decorate it with blue syrup, slap a “Facebook” sign on it and wait for the new business to roll in. Believe it or not, his plan actually worked. The treat has been a big hit with tourists this summer, and Adili told reporters it’s been going like crazy. His Facebook ice cream apparently tastes like chewing gum and candy, but it’s not the flavor that has customers begging for more, but the name and the trademark “Facebook” logo on the sign.

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Frustrated by the amount of time they spent on Facebook during workdays, two MIT doctoral candidates have created the Pavlov Poke, a keyboard palm rest that sends electric shocks whenever the user spends too much time on “email, social networking, or other online distractions”.

Robert R. Morris and Dan McDuff are both Ph.D. candidates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but like millions of other internet users out there, they are also social media addicts. After estimating they waste a combined 50 hours a week on Facebook, the two decided to take a new approach to fighting social media addiction by using electroshock therapy to keep users from wasting most of their days on sites like Facebook and Twitter. Named after the well-known Russian psychologist who performed behavioral experiments on dogs, the Pavlov Poke is a keyboard accessory programmed to send electrical shocks into users whenever they spend too much time scrolling through their Facebook news feed or browsing on distracting websites. The shocks are strong enough to make you react, but while they are unpleasant they are not dangerous.

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A Boston father and his 14-year-old daughter have recently made the headlines after the man posted a photo of a Facebook Deactivation Agreement that states the girl will receive 200$ if she doesn’t log into her Facebook account for the next five months.

Facebook addiction is one of the most talked-about issues of the moment, and when it comes to teens, the problem is even bigger. But one Boston parent may have found the perfect way to convince his daughter to take a nice long break from the popular social media platform – he’s paying her $200. The enterprising young girl has managed to strike a deal with her father, Paul Baier, that involves him paying her $50 in April and an extra $150 in June, if she respects her part of the agreement. “It was her idea, which I fully support,” Paul told the Daily Dot. “She wants to earn money and also finds Facebook a distraction and a waste of time sometimes.”

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Do you want to make your ex-girlfriend by hooking up with a hot chick on Facebook? Are your parents pressuring you to go out and get a date? Are you tired of being teased about not having a girlfriend? If any of this sounds familiar, know that there’s hope for you yet. It’s called Namoro Fake, and it’s a Brazilian company that offers fake Facebook girlfriends, for a fee.

Just because you couldn’t get a girlfriend if your life depended on it, doesn’t mean all your friends have to know about it. What if you could make it seem like you’re dating this beautiful woman, who seems crazy about you that she leave romantic comments on your profile every single day? That would probably make you look cool in front of your friends and maybe even score some points with the ladies in real life, right? Well, that’s probably all the guys that are using Namoro Fake’s services are thinking, anyway. The Brazilian company offers guys the chance at a fake virtual relationship for as little as $10. The relationship may not be real, but the girls behind the profiles certainly are. Namoro Fake hires female Facebook users to act as girlfriends, and apparently splits the proceeds with them. Since you’ll be sending them the exact messages you want posted on your Wall, all they have to do is paste the messages and keep their profiles active to make them seem more real. If you purchase the expensive packages, they’ll even list you in their relationship status. Users can choose their girlfriend from various Facebook profiles listed on the company’s website.

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A 16-year-old girl from Haren, the Netherlands, forgot to set her Facebook birthday invitation to private and got a few thousand more guests than she was expecting. And if that wasn’t enough, the revelers also started a riot in the small Dutch town.

Why don’t these young school girls ever learn? Jut last year a similar event took place after a German girl forgot to make her Facebook birthday invitation private and got 1,500 unwanted guests. Police were able to contain the crowd back then, but on September 21st 2012, things really got out of control in Haren. After the young girl posted her public invite on Facebook, her friends started sharing it with their friends, sites started posting about it, and soon the whole thing grew out of proportion to the point where 30,000 users confirmed their presence to the event known as Project X Haren. This was turning into way more than the girl had planned for her big day, so the authorities were alerted. The party was cancelled, and the police appealed to Facebook revelers, asking them not to descend on Haren. Despite their best efforts, at least 3,000 people from all over the Netherlands turned up, and they were not the most peaceful bunch either.

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ArLynn Presser is a 51-year-old woman who lives in Winnetka, Illinois. It’s normal for ArLynn to stay indoors all the time. In fact, for most of her adult life, she hardly ever left the confines of her home, and most certainly did not venture out of her home town. Her career as a writer ensured that she could spend her life indoors and still get things done. If this sounds strange to you, you must know that ArLynn suffers from agoraphobia – the fear of crowded places or enclosed public spaces.

Like most introverts, ArLynn interacts with people online and she has 325 friends she chats with on Facebook. Last year, she went and did something that no one could have ever expected. On 31^st of Dec, 2010, she made a resolution to meet all 325 of her Facebook friends in person, the following year. She wrote a blog post about it and then set about achieving her goal. She called her project “Face to Facebook”. For a person who was terrified of flying and could never get on a plane before, this was certainly a daunting task. In the end, she did a great job, traveling over 13 countries and taking over 39 flights. By the end of 2011, she had met 292 friends, about 90% of what she had intended to. ArLynn had been to Taiwan, Korea, Philippines, Dubai, Italy, Malaysia, Ireland, England, Germany and four other countries.

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A Saudi man was all over the news a few days ago for putting up his son for sale on Facebook – for a whopping $20 million. Now he says that he did it only to bring attention to his poverty, and he didn’t really intend to sell his son.

In a country where the male child is regarded precious, it came as a shock when Saud bin Nasser Al Shahry did the unthinkable. He was under serious attack and criticism, especially from religions leaders of the nation. A prominent Islamic scholar, Sheikh Mohammed Al Nujaimi said that Al Shahry had violated Islam by offering to sell his child despite his financial problems. Al Shahry responds that he never did want to sell his son. Facing bankruptcy, and with no one else willing to help him, he had to resort to such an extreme measure. “Of course I never intended to sell my son. I only made this announcement to attract the attention of decision makers in the country to my tragedy after I became jobless and started to beg for food and clothes,” he told local newspapers.

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In older times, it was “off with your head” if you spoke ill of the King. Now, you go to jail for posting your feelings on Facebook about the Thai monarchy, which many of the Thai folk actively do. In fact, over 10,000 pages of material was found on the social networking, containing images or text that is offensive to the royal family.

The Information Minister of Thailand, Anudith Nakornthap, warned the people of Thailand that if users on Facebook so much as even like or share any kind of information insulting the monarchy, the consequences would be severe. Such a person could be charged with violation of the lese majeste laws of the country, and could serve up to 15 years in prison. He also advised people to ‘unlike’ any pages and remove any comments made on similar lines. In a world where democracy and freedom of speech are taken for granted in most countries, this news might come across as quite surprising. I mean, we’ve lost count of the number of jokes made online at the expense of Bush, Palin and the likes. Thailand however, has always been strict in enforcing laws that protect the dignity of the sovereign.

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If you thought a smartphone was the ultimate way to take your Facebook friends with you wherever you go, think again. A woman from the Netherlands just covered her right arm with tattoos of her 152 Facebook friends profile pictures.

Just yesterday I posted an article about a young German girl who forgot to set her Facebook birthday invitation as private and wound up with 1,500 unwanted guests in front of her house, and now this…This whole Facebook social stuff is really getting out of control. Anyway, the social networking addict known only by her YouTube username, Susyj87, spent four months going to the tattoo parlor to have her friends’ Facebook profile photos inked into her skin. Luckily, she only has 152 friends on the popular online network, otherwise who knows, she might have needed a full body tattoo.

Susyj87 probably got this shocking social tattoo to feel close to her friends even when she’s not online, but I wonder what’s going to happen when they change their profile pictures, or when she has a falling out with one of them?

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