94: Profile Creation Flowchart

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Profile Creation Flowchart

Title text: This one goes out to xxCrazyPixie1987xx

Explanation

AIM (short for AOL Instant Messenger) offered its users profile pages to share info about themselves or their friends. Randall notes that these pages fall into one of three categories:

• People without friends or significant others linked to their LiveJournal;
• People with friends and significant others would celebrate it all over their page;
• Sometimes people with friends would fill their profile with inside jokes only their friends could understand.

Both AIM and LiveJournal were known for their teenage user base, as shown by the title text's fictional AIM screen name.

Transcript

[A flowchart is shown.]

Have Friends? - No - Link to your LiveJournal

Have Friends? - Yes, and want to alienate everyone else - INSIDE JOKES!

Have Friends? - Yes - Have Boyfriend/ Girlfriend? - No - Angsty about it? - Yes - Link to your LiveJournal

Angsty about it? - No - Yes you are - Angsty about it?

Have Boyfriend/Girlfriend? - Yes - A profile tribute is the greatest possible expression of love.

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Discussion

The Natalie Dee comic 956 is titled (or labelled) "this one goes out to xxcrazypixie1987xx", i.e. (apart from case) exactly the title text of this comic. Dee was published some months after xkcd (August 2006 instead of April 2006), but if the date stamp in the URL is correct still a few days before xkcd's 143: Parody Week: TFD and Natalie Dee was published. Not sure if this is common Natalie Dee folklore or if it's worth mentioning in the explanation here (and maybe also at #143, then). --YMS (talk) 14:27, 18 December 2017 (UTC)

Good catch. I think we should remove the original title-text line, seeing as it's not accurate. (The screen name isn't exactly fictional.) DownGoer (talk) 04:07, 26 June 2023 (UTC)