• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, November 8, 2010

Perhaps buoyed by the scene in the film "The Social Network" where a young Mark Zuckerberg creates FaceMash while drunk blogging about the girl who just dumped him, online security firm Webroot has created a hilarious "Social Media Sobriety Test" that assesses your chemical state of being to determine whether you should be allowed to access social media accounts and start firing off messages in the wee hours. As Webroot explains, "Nothing good happens online after 1am," and the service is intended to prevent those humiliating incidents which result from the intersection of two bottles of wine and a Blackberry, and which may entail the loss of friends, jobs, spouses, or possibly even lives.

To use the service, you just download the 2 MB plug-in and tell Webroot the sites where you think you might benefit from some late-night supervision, including Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Flickr, Tumblr and YouTube. The company has created a tongue-in-cheek PSA-style video alluding to the social ills resulting from drunk posting, and demonstrating sobriety tests based on the traditional roadside assessments administered by the police: in one, the user has to keep the mouse cursor in a circle moving around the screen, akin to the "follow my finger" challenge.

One odd aspect of this amusing service: if you fail the sobriety test, Webroot will automatically post a message on Facebook, Twitter, or whatever site you're trying to access, advising all and sundry that you are "too intoxicated to post right now." Predictably, the automatic post also contains a promotion for the social media sobriety test. It's funny, and I guess it allows you to boast about inebriation if that was your aim, but it obviously defeats any real attempt at screening your own behavior.

In other words the service is basically a joke. It's also kind of limited because it only covers alcohol, and there is a real need to address online posting under the influence of other inebriants.

For example, I've read countless social media posts which were almost certainly made under the influence of marijuana; the classic pot post is a confused explanation of a really great idea which trails off somewhere after a lengthy preamble, at once overlong and incomplete -- followed by another, much shorter post to the effect that ice cream is awesome.

Moving into somewhat harder drugs, I can only imagine that Ecstasy leads to quite a bit of ill-advised social media use: after all, Facebook aggregates all your loved ones, making it an ideal forum to tell them all just how much you love them -- which is very, very much -- including your mom, your old gym teacher, your co-workers, and your boss. If you're lucky most of them will just assume you're drunk in the "I love you man" phase -- but subsequent posts about, say, the amazing texture of shag carpet on your naked skin may give away the game.