FriendTest.com

If you're like me, you're constantly struggling to find a way to prune the scads of friends following you around. When unlisting your phone number, failing to RSVP to birthday parties and laying out the candid "You don't have what it takes to be my friend" talk don't work, what's next? Luckily, FriendTest.com has a foolproof method for cutting the benchwarmers on your team.

FriendTest offers two applications: a 10-question personalized quiz in order to ascertain which facts and arbitrary information your friends know about you, and a poll allowing your friends to rate the qualities they admire or disdain in you such as "humor," "intelligence" and "bravery." Despite an unfortunate typo in one of the questions — your friends give you a 1-to-10 score on "Is this person cleaver?" — most of the qualities presented are unrelated to meat chopping. However, your friends respond to this poll anonymously, leaving you to wonder whether it was your boyfriend or your mom who rated your looks an abysmal "1."

Thankfully, FriendTest's other survey is a much more efficient manner of getting to the good stuff with your loved ones. Your respondents are ranked by name on a "High Score" list, providing you with endless practical applications. I recently rounded up a sampling of my so-called "friends" as guinea pigs to test the effectiveness of the FriendTest Quiz. I wrote two 10-question quizzes: "How well do you know Sara J. Brenneis?" and "Remedial Sara 101." The first quiz contained such stumpers as:

Sara is not a/an:
A) Aries
B) Liberal
C) fair-skinned maiden of German descent
D) Native Midwesterner
E) Graduate Student Instructor

Each question, admittedly written with a subtle hand, had only one right answer. The answer to this question, while to most of my friends seemed to be none of the above, was actually D) Native Midwesterner. Although I have spent all but three months of my life in Wisconsin, I was actually born in Connecticut. This quiz befuddled even the closest of my compatriots, with the highest score still a failing grade of 40% (F-), and my own mother ringing in with a miserable 10%. Sadly, the one question she got right was not the aforementioned.

To Mom's credit, the first quiz was difficult, misleading, and somewhat poorly worded. So, in "Remedial Sara 101," the questions were more along the lines of:

Sara's favorite meal to eat out is:
A) breakfast
B) brunch
C) lunch
D) tea-time
E) dinner

Most of my friends, having suffered my manias gladly, correctly answered B) brunch, but in this quiz I gave partial credit for other not-completely-right questions such as A) breakfast (because it could be confused with brunch) and D) tea-time (because I also like tea-time). The percentages went way up for "Remedial Sara 101," with Mom topping the High Score list with a solid 93% (A), and my friends pulling mostly high B's and C's.

The beauty of FriendTest, aside from the always welcome distraction of anything on the Internet that involves taking a quiz and scoring it, are the practical applications. Too many people on the wedding guest list? Write an "Our Beautiful Relationship for Beginners" quiz to weed out those who fail to remember where you met. Not enough money in your inheritance for everyone in the will? Keep only those who score 75% and above on your "What My Dependents Had Better Remember" quiz. The possibilities are as limitless as your imagination, and it's a learning experience for everyone. Through my quizzes, I learned that my friends remember most of the embarrassing things I've told them about myself, and they learned that I like to watch dry-walling on TV. With the FriendTest, everyone's a winner. Except, of course, for the losers, and you probably don't want them hanging around anyway.

— Sara J. Brenneis (sara at flakmag dot com)