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Facebook seems to have gotten big mainly by chance. like being the only bacteria in the pietry dish. The only savvy they had was realizing the peitre dish was available and rushing to get there first.

You're right, no one ever thought of social sites before Facebook.

andy zebrowitz.

andrew zebrowitz

andy zebrowitz

The Amiga history clearly shows the Amiga was based on Atari technology way before the Macintosh was even developed.

Nice try, but someone who used to work at Commodore Amiga knows the history of the Amiga better than most.

Not exactly. You can enter information about your class/company/troop-mates, not just yourself. It just takes one bored member of your seventh grade homeroom to enter the fact that you and, say, Timothy McVeigh went to school together. They've amassed information covering a decent percentage of the US population that way. You can opt-out, but it begs the question of who owns the information of where you went to school: You? Your school? Your classmates? All of the above?

should hope our top ranking officials aren't so dim as to put themselves out there like that. The same information is available via public record anyway, it simply isn't collected in one nice easily searchable web portal available to anyone with a computer.

I'm not so concerned about the upper echelons of the organizations that are already easily mappable -- I believe that during the cold war the US figured out other countries' military structures just from wedding photos in newspapers, along with other public information.

I'm more worried about this kind of information being used to fill in the details on a massive scale at the lower levels of social, corporate, and military structures. Knowing that Ms. XYZ used to be the CEO of XYZ Corp. is old hat. Knowing that Mr. ABC used to sleep with the disgruntled coworker of the janitor at some facility that you're interested in...that could be new.

If they did, its hello 1984 with random retinal scanners a la Minority Report.

I'm sure the Parts Order has already been submitted.

Based on a friend's suggestion, I created an alternate e-mail address and used it to create user IDs on classmates.com and match.com and, sure enough, until I kill the ID months later, I was getting 30+ spams a day after my ISP was done with its own filtering. I wasn't being very scientific and I don't know if it was one or the other or both, but it's a place to start...

eCircles did all these things from 1997 until 2000.

They eventually ran out of money and were bought by Classmates.

Depends. Lets say you find her address and decide to drive over and check the house out. Or call her up at the office "just to hear" her voice. That would be stalking.

On the other hand, isn't that what Classmates.com is doing? Letting you find old classmates and pals from your glorious youth?