A peculiar fact about Facebook is that you are not supposed to write on your own wall. Because that really could have gone either way, eh? With blogs, conversations take place on a single blog, often with the blog’s owner commenting on his or her own blog. It has the advantage of the entire conversation being in one place. But a disadvantage is that anyone who comments on a blog will have to go back to that blog to see if anyone responded to it.

What I wonder is who decided that posting on your own blog is OK, but posting on your own Facebook profile is not. Was it one person who persuasively argued for a position? (e.g., I’ve seen it argued that posting on your own wall is like leaving a note on your own fridge and hoping your friends will stop by to read it) Or did it just happen naturally due to subtle properties of Facebook that make having conversations between walls easier than having them on a single wall? Or was it completely arbitrary, with one position that just happened to spread around and eventually became codified as a new taboo?

It makes you wonder if other taboos develop in similar ways. Like, who decided it was wrong to wear a hat at dinner time? I’m sure there was a good reason for it at one point, but now, I see no reason why having a piece of cloth on your head disrupts a meal.

Of course, a good source of LOLs is breaking taboos, so I’m gonna go write inane messages to friends on my own Facebook wall while I eat pizza in a cowboy hat.