Why Your Friends Are Giraffes & How to Use or Block Bitstrips [Weekly Facebook Tips]

Are all of your friends giraffes? Probably. Does this mean there is a sudden explosion of love for tall mammals? No. Your friends are just not thinking things through well enough.

The last couple of weeks on Facebook have been huge for two big memes: The giraffe riddle and Bitstrips comics. Here's what you need to know about these memes, including how to have a go yourself.

The Giraffe Meme

There's this riddle going around Facebook:

"It's 3am, the doorbell rings and you wake up. Unexpected visitors!! It's your parents and they are here for breakfast. You have strawberry jam, honey, wine, bread and cheese. What do you open first?"

The giraffe part of this is that you should PM (private message) the person who posted it with your guess. If you get the answer wrong, you need to change your profile picture to a giraffe for 3 days.

SPOILER ALERT! So, what do you open first? Your eyes. Although some people seem to think "the door" is also an acceptable answer.

This is why your Facebook friends are giraffes. Now you know exactly how process-obsessed your giraffe friends aren't.

Post by Kiss FM (UK).

The Comics Flood

There are also billions of comics flooding Facebook at the moment, which are all being generated by Bitstrips, an easy way to create comics online. Now, the Bitstrips website itself is often down at the moment, thanks to its sudden popularity, but the apps are still available for Android and iOS [No Longer Available], though often subject to the same crashes as the site. There are dozens of other great tools to create a comic strip, though right now seems to be Bitstrips's heyday.

Using Bitstrips

The Bitstrips meme has become so big that there are now apps just for viewing other people's bitstrips and tutorial apps for Bitstrips. It's all a bit much.

It's not exactly hard to use Bitstrips, though. Just get the app, design your avatar and then design your strip. Simple. Fun. Cute.

Your avatar can be tailored to show your hair colour, hair length, hairstyle, eye shape, eye colour, facial lines, clothing style, specific outfit, headwear, makeup, height, build, chest size, etc., until you're completely satisfied. You could do this in 2 minutes or tweak it a little each day.

Creating the cartoons themselves take very little effort. You find a scene, edit it to show facial expressions and balloon speech bubbles, then share away on your timeline. Well, that's the basics anyway.

Memelicious Bitstrips

What makes Bitstrips so memelicious is the use of co-stars. When you decide to add a co-star to Bitstrips, you can use the avatar and name of any of your friends who have already built an avatar for Bitstrips. When you share it on Facebook, mutual friends will see the fun and decide to check out Bitstrips for themselves. Then the cycle continues when they use your avatar in a strip.

How To Hide Bitstrips

It's only after playing with Bitstrips for a while that we realise that Facebook is already completely inundated with Bitstrips. But whatever, it's all good fun.

However, some of you are already over the Bitstrips fun. Here's how to block Bitstrips, or indeed any other meme app that hits your news feed.

When you see the Bitstrips entry, click on the arrow in the top right and choose "Hide All From Bitstrips". It should disappear along with everyone else's Bitstrips.

How To Block Bitstrips

If you really want to block Bitstrips for good, head to your Settings > > Blocking > Block Apps and type in Bitstrips.

This might be worth doing if you are being added to strips you don't like by Facebook friends. It will stop Bitstrips from being able to use your information any more. On the other hand, if your friends are doing things like that despite you asking them not to, maybe they're not really worth keeping as friends and should be potentially blocked or unfriended.