Slashdot Mirror
How Social Networks May Kill Search as We Know It
mattnyc99 writes "Recently we discussed a startup that's blending social networking with traditional Web search. But now high geek Glenn Derene takes it one step further, pronouncing that our increasingly traceable online footprints will transform Google's dominant algorithm and open up the world of Web search for the 21st century. Speaking to a tuned-in VC guy and scoring a rare interview with Google's VP of search, Derene may have some meat behind his newly-coined term: 'faceboogle.' From the article: 'As we each carve out our individual niche on the Web, the logic of search may well flip inside out. Since we are essentially meta-tagging ourselves through our social networking memberships, shopping habits and surfing addictions, it's conceivable that the information could attempt to find us — the old concept of push media, but in a far more refined way.'"
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I love the smell of a frizosty in the morning
Not sure how google will outlive the threat from human-tagged information, both from social networks and Wiki's.
Ever notice Wiki is in the top three hits to EVERY SEARCH in Google?
Seconded.
nm
Cue the 'Soviet Russia' jokes in three...
Two...
One...
"the old concept of push media, but in a far more refined way.'"
You push it! You push it real good!
All joking aside, I have serious doubts that push media could account for my eclectic tastes. My friends can't even figure me out, how is a stupid computer going to?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
faceboogle!
But seriously I think most of us are thinking the same sentiment.
I literally spit out a mouthful of Diet Coke upon reading that. "Faceboogle" replaces "blogmarklet" as The Worst New Word Ever. (Although it's still less annoying than "__? Not so much.)
How does one get to become "high geek", anyway?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
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The Faceboogle concept assumes that I want to search just for those things which already match my existing online footprint.
When I search, however, it's usually because I want to find information on something NEW.
Can it possibly be true that most searching is just for the same old topics--teenagers looking for the latest gossip on their favorite celebrity? Perhaps. But that sure doesn't describe how I--and most of the folks I know--use search.
This will never happen. For myself and most people I know, the internet is about acquiring information about things we aren't familiar with, not about rehashing information which we already know. Whether that information be used for personal enjoyment - learning something new for the sake of learning something new - or for personal research, like say looking up probable diseases you may have based on symptoms. For anything like this, social networking information will never provide you with what you need.
The only realm where such a thing were to exist is in adolescents. Your friend discovered an new Naruto website with awesome backgrounds and your interest in Naruto, which is listed in your profile, allows the network to make the connection.
Seriously! You must die now!
A faceboogle is something you find on the tip of your finger if you search really hard in your nose.
Die die die!
Let's refine this a bit. *Perhaps* there is a use for boolg'ling web search content toward consumer taste. But it's likely that not many of my friends are researching topics similar to my own.
So, social tags would be relevant only for - let's pretend, here, c'mon - consumer taste. Everything else - like scholarly research, etc - I'm afraid has to be done the hard, old way - by knowing how and where to search.
--Dave
Knock them out??? If anyone says it to me they will never find the teeny tiny body parts scattered all over the country.
Maybe it's just me, but nowadays my searches are flooded with crappy blogs (and not the spam kind either, at least not true spam).
If Google, or any other search engine, hammers home the idea that they keep track of your IP address and past searches it could cause an outcry and a demand for privacy. Connecting ad content to past searches is exactly such a hammer. A significant number of internet searches involve sex. If a user starts getting ads for duct tape because they previously did searches for "hamster duct tape sex" they might suddenly get behind regulations that would control the way Google used information.
For the humor impaired: I utterly abhor the abuse of animals. This is a reference to the joke discussion group of long ago alt.sex.hamsters.duct.tape.
I thought faceboogle was a sex act but then again I also though hulu was was a popular dance fad
Suddenly Peter Doofus is linked to his own content, and, well, things pretty much unzip from there. I have a lot of misgivings about Google these days. They say "Do no evil" but it seems they are slowly becoming something I don't really approve of...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Googleface!
"faceboogle," sigh! Anybody else remember the creative term "Veronica" search (Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index of Computerized Archives) that we used to search across gopher servers? Sheesh! I feel old.
"Meat" and "Faceboogle" brought to mind the final scene of "Boogie Nights."
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
How about no.
"As we each carve out our individual niche on the Web, the logic of search may well flip inside out. Since we are essentially meta-tagging ourselves through our social networking memberships, shopping habits and surfing addictions, it's conceivable that the information could attempt to find us â" the old concept of push media, but in a far more refined way.'"
Faceboogle == metadata tagging == semantic web
Its all the same set of possibilities once we have better data (about the data) that we aim to use in our algorithms.
When will the jargon end? Is this guy actually being made noteworthy for re-iterating the functionality being strived toward by all involved in the semantic web initiative?
Hey! Whatever happened to searching for good ol' ordinary information? The Faceboogle concept is a desperate attempt to create a new viral word, but seems too "people-specific" and, moreover, sounds like something that happens suddenly in a p0rn clip. Frankly, searching for people-oriented things is fairly small fraction of what I use search engines for (I know this is a fallacy to project this onto others, but I can't be alone in this). In fairness, Facebook has been pretty good at people-finding for me; but when Google decides to buy Facebook, the point will be moot anyway. It will all quasi-statically merge into one big happy Google Search.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
Yes, a total load of crap. The word, the concept, push technology, you name it. Crap.
I will quit working with the internet and computers completely if the term faceboogle becomes real industry jargon.
Facebooble? If that's not the right name for you, it is for someone. And given all the spam, er, push media, I think it exists.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
wut
Who's coming up with these terms, Bill Cosby?
"As we each carve out our individual niche on the Web"
Because my day hinges on knowing what someone else had for dinner last night, how many times they use its/it's and your/you're incorrectly, and how frustrated their boss makes them. No one cares and no one will ever care about your crap, so just stop worrying about how people will search it.
Google would be better off just ignoring any "look at me, I'm smart enough to make a Internet websites!!!" sites.
Just like visiting friends killed libraries in the 1800s. No way in hell are searches going down the drain! Every time somebody sends me something, then I do more searching to find out more about it.
So your mom says "baby, you can do anything you want..." And I'm all "faceboogle?"
Never argue with a man carrying a water buffalo
Certainly this is every advertizer's wet-dream - to stop their advertisements from being parasatized by filthy content.
What if everyone just say down at their computers and allowed themselves to be passively inundated with whatever they were told to like. Wouldn't that be wondrous?
I don't doubt that such targeted advertizing is going to increase dramatically in both power and sophistication over the coming years - and that the percentage of ads I see which are for things that I might actually want will rise dramatically. But will this replace google, which does a good job of providing me with things that I actually want to see for my own purposes? No, it won't. Not in a million years.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
The idea that the 'computer' will decide what I want and what is 'good for me' reminds me a lot of the machine that made the tea in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe". http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/hitchhikers/guide/tea.shtml The machine decided what would please you more than anything and not quite provide it.
The facegoogle sounds a lot like the tea machine.
All these people that parade themselves across the internet, posting information about themselves. I don't care about them; and, I don't care to do the same. I can only imagine that I am not alone.
Why do those that participate in these 'social networks' think everyone else wants to join in?
Real geeks used jughead.
Anyone interested in changing themselves for the better, anyone wanna make a happier life?
Remember how every time you tried something new in H.S. or somewhere your peer group push you back into the mold of you they thought was 'the real you'? Ever have that happen in life? With parents? With all your long-term relationships?
Now the web will do the same thing
HELLO TO THE STATIC PERSONALITY. We don't change, nope never happens. You just refine your search algorithm and help us figure out who we are by marketing 'content' at us. Yeah.
IMO, Phucked.
The use of "social networking" data for search has been discussed before in the search technology community, where it's not well thought of. "Inertia" in search, where your search history affects your later results, turns out to be a pain. Search becomes nonrepeatable, both for the individual and for others. This adds more hassle than the gain provided by "inertia".
Reading both the article and the interview with the Google VP, it's clear that the article exaggerates Google's interest in this area.
Social networking data is taken seriously on the advertising side, where using social networking data for ad selection is already being done by Myspace and their ilk. Amazon and Netflix already have rather good systems for deciding what to recommend to their customers. That's where this really works, where the seller has a big product selection and the user is already prepped to buy something. Myspace isn't doing as well, but then, as we've pointed out before, their advertisers are mostly bottom feeders. Ad rates on Myspace are very low, and it shows.
A key question is who controls the use of the social networking data for ad selection. Not the user, of course; the disagreement is between the social networking sites and the search engines. Look for a battle in that area, perhaps followed by mergers.
Anybody else remember the creative term "Veronica" search
Yep, guess that makes you old. Veronica is obviously a "backronym" (the phrase behind it was invented to afterwards to match the word). There is the WWW now, which essentially replaced Gopher space, but before that the 'net was all about FTP. To seach public FTP archives you used "Archive Search", which was contracted to the nickname "Archie". Then Gopher came out which added structure to the big pile of archives, and a Gopher search was made for it. Since it was a search utility "companion" to Archie it was named Veronica (as in the comic book characters).
Later a localhost-only, optimised search utility for a Gopher host was made called....Jughead (because it was the "lazy friend" of Archie and Veronica).
This article reminds me of theories about the 'net eventually becoming sentient...with this big trail of info crumbs we might find our friends Archie, Veronica and Jughead will turn into stalkers...
Sounds like a term used in porn to me....
Monstar L
Am I the only one left who doesn't get it and certainly won't benefit from such a contorted way of searching for information?
I have mailing lists for discussing particular activities or fields of knowledge, good, 'ol full-text search aided with a bix of context for searching on the web and a group of actual friends for socialising, not a list of other peoples' accounts that someone labeled "friends" for no good reason when making the UI.
Is there actually anything this all "social networking" is good for?
This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
Not sure how google will outlive the threat from human-tagged information, both from social networks and Wiki's.
Ever notice Wiki is in the top three hits to EVERY SEARCH in Google?
Did you ever notice you are on Google, and not the Wiki search page, when you make that observation?
Obviously there's a reason. Wiki's (esp. Wkipedia which I'm sure is what you were really referring to) are great resources but are certainly not the only link I look at in search results - even if they are the top hits in many searches.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I don't use Facebook, MySpace, or any of those social sites precisely because of the quality of the content there and the caliber of the people who use them. There's nothing on those sites that I look for, and I routinely ignore search results with social networking site results because of my experience with the crappy quality of information there: think Nextag and product searches.
Quotes like "Search has always been about people" show a fundamental ignorance of how most people over the age of 25 use search, and whatever accuracy it may contain is a damning indicator of the underachievement of those for whom it is true.
... then we could have 3.1 or maybe 3.5 hey even 3.51
The future is ours!
...when I post on the internet, I post anonymously.
maybe they won't. I sure know that most of the searches I do have little to do with my profile.
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tagged youvegottobefuckingkiddingme
No lie!
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
Bam! How's your face liking them boogles now, huh?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_Belmont ftw
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
Because,
1) Desire for privacy will win out.
2) The data will totally get spammed.
3) Push has *never* succeeded online and never will.
There are more, but 3 is enough.
The internet is the ultimate pull media, and those who push stuff hate that about it, mainly because they can't get in our way.
Even the first ever push medium, the classic banner ad, has never gotten any traction. They get ignored. Newsletters are also overrated. Most mail that comes from sources that we opt-in and subscribe to get glanced and deleted. Only coupons are worthy of any motivation to act for most of us. Even ads inserted before movie clips are avoidable. Find us on a different tab, looking at something else.
The last time I clicked on a banner was in the 90s, and I think it was my own to check if it was working.
Faceboogle is bad but the alternates are even worse. What if people used Goofaced? Think of how mad you would be if you found out someone Goofaced you.
Facebook alone is enough to put me in a rage. But I guess I must grudgingly accept the fact that I am apparently one of only four computer-literate people left in the English speaking world who doesn't live and die by their facebook page. Ridiculous. My unborn children will hate me for sure.
A-Bomb
Since we are essentially meta-tagging ourselves through our social networking memberships...
Speak for yourself, writer person. I don't use "social networking." I don't care what my friends had for lunch, and I don't want my ex to know who my next ex is going to be by virtually sitting them down next to each other. That's bananas.
I really should write a form letter to politely decline Plaxo, LinkedIn, Orkut, Facebook, Myspace, etc. invitations that well intentioned people keep sending me.
I even avoid IM, because hey, why do I want to let 20 people know I am at the computer RIGHT NOW? SOMEONE always wants to talk. And if I spend most of my time pretending to be away or invisible, then IM has become a burden and not a help to me.
Old fashioned methods of communication like email still work great for me. I do not want to be transparent. If you do, you mystify me.
facebooger, gooface, it still sounds like someone sneezed w/o a kleenex handy.
Kevin Smith on Prince
What's REALLY annoying, is "blog". Did weblog really need to be abbreviated?
Gooface
Agreed.
If they say Yahspace, then there shall be no mercy.
I'm one of the other 3.
Yay, I'm in a minority!
Seriously though, what is the whole facebook thing about? I've never understood it.
I'm almost permanently in IRC, so maybe it happened while I wasn't looking.
Oh, the irony... "Anonymous Coward: If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear!"
If this is the case, and people start being more cautious again about identifying themselves in meatspace on the social networks, this search trend might shrivel. On the other hand, this increased search capability of the social networks might help the scenario I eluded to above to be realized fairly quickly, since search for a person's background is made easier by those doing background checks.
Again...maybe it is my older age on this, but, ever since I've had my identity stolen twice, I've really started thinking Python got it right about the "Importance of not being seen".
I like to post on the net quite a bit, and while I know with some effort, I could be tracked even through here, but, I try to always use pseudonyms when posting, and often have used nym accounts and mail2news type services to stay anonymous even more on USENET posts. I know someone can find stuff about me, but, it would take more effort than just a quick search on a myspace 'search' like the article is mentioning....where with a simple real meatspace name, you can find out that a person like smoking grass, doing nude beer bongs (with pictures), and is open minded about the whole gerbil/Gere thing. If it comes between that person, and someone who pretty much makes it less than trivial to searched....who do you think will get the job?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
They changed it from the original name, when they found it evoked undesirable imagery.
Used to be 'MySpoogle'.
One man's constant is another man's variable.
And even though you're rarely searching for something you've seen before, it's possible that knowledge of what you have seen before might still be used to put your searches into a better context.
If you're a parent planning to remodel your daughter's bathroom, for example: even though this may be the first time you've ever searched for fixtures with gender-specific decorations for children, a search engine that knows a bit about your demographics could probably give MUCH better results when you type in "tub girl".
ON the contrary, I think that future generations will be a lot less judgemental, basically because all of them will have a semi public life.
In 50 years they will laugh at our "ooh no somebody just had sex" political scandals.
Unless we get conquered by Muslims or something.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
This guy is obviously high.
Ever hear of lijit? Sounds like the same thing. It basically creates a private search engine based on many social networking accounts (including facebook, delicious, myspace, blogs, etc). If you have friends, it spiders out to their results too. The company is based on the founder's thesis from 2004... so how is faceboogle a new idea?
http://www.coderoshi.com/
I see this type of development as a preliminary step towards creating virtual artificial intelligence representations of ourselves. As we observe the way the user parses information on their computer, the decisions they make, the type of sources they prefer, we build up a sort of virtual image of their thought patterns. Over time, this will evolve into fairly sophisticated AI reflections of ourselves, for the purpose of acting like personal agents to scour the internet for us and find the information we might be interested in. If we could duplicate ourselves infinitely and turn ourselves loose on the internet, the wealth of relevant data at our disposal would grow tremendously. As these personal agents learn our thought patters over the years, they might even be capable of forming social relationships for us, finding other people who might share our interests and agendas. These agents could even continue to function long after the person it was modeled from is dead, possibly acting as a living reflection of your personality for your descendants. This market drive will be the catalyst for technology allowing us to eventually transfer our minds and personalities onto a computer.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
There is a phase in one's life where you need to advertise; birds do it with coloured feathers and elaborate dances, and teenagers looking for a partner do it with coloured feathers and elaborate dances. You have to advertise your availability, until you are no longer available, then it makes sense to hide.
The problem with social networking sites is that the feathers aren't real. And the false image of the feathers stays forever.
I, too, am regretting the purchase of that modem so many long years ago, but so far I've resisted the urge to let everyone know that Nefarious Wheel is actuafasf6789#$%^-=[NO CARRI
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
With all of the different avenues for expression, most of us are leaving vast imprints of ourselves on the web. For me, I have comments, photos, and relationships expressed on: Slashdot, TheDailyWTF, Digg, Amazon, Facebook, Friendster, Flickr, YouTube, Yahoo Answers, Blogger, Match, Usenet boards, Battlenet, my personal web pages, and much more. Some of those are current but many are old and not an accurate reflection of my current self.
For now most of those facets of my personality are separate. Someone reading this post is unlikely to link this personality to my Flickr photos or old Usenet postings. But someday a search engine like Google will figure out which personas are linked to me, even if I used different usernames and email addresses for each one. There are enough hints in the form of interests, writing style, and secondary links to tie them together. And there are likely archives of all those web postings going back to the dawn of the web.
So now I am tending to filter what I say in any forum, knowing that someday a prospective employer, landlord, creditor, lawyer, or mate will read it. The age of freedom and anonymity online has ended. The only hope is that those seeing our former selves will learn to accept our fluidity and diversity of behavior.
If you don't like the word faceboogle, jam it into regular speech by using it as a metasyntactic! That's totally faceboogle! foo + bar = faceboogle
I have no Facebook. I'm not sure we can continue to consider the Facebook community part of the English speaking world, either.
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
On the one hand, you are completely right. I have seen potential job candidates judged on the cleavage in their Facebook photos--and this is all without accessing the actual page.
But you don't have to put anything questionable on your page. There's nothing inherent in myspace etc that you couldn't put on your homepage. So I think some people will lose jobs over it but they will get jobs eventually and learn their lesson.
Much scarier is what corporations and governments may want to do with that info. Facebook scares the friendliness out of me and I'm not too pleased that Murdoch owns Myspace. The same people that don't want their names on the PETA mailing list are happy to post pics of themselves protesting free trade.
"Faceboogle" is a classic example of the phenomenon I call "world wide web portmanteau." That name is a bit long; for short, I've coined a new term, "wwwortmanteau."
Thank you, thank you. I'll be here again Thursday night.
Haven't you ever wondered what happened to your best friend from Elementary school? Your favorite acquaintances from college? It's not about chat. It is about keeping a link to people that would otherwise get left behind. As (at least in the U.S.) society becomes more mobile there is a strong desire to keep those ties. There's a lot of lonely people out there who treasure reading the blogs, hearing the music, and looking at pictures of former in-the-flesh friends.
So if I stay away from social networking sites, I become a "non-target" for push media ads?
another good reason to stay away from facebook and myspace.
"who do you think will get the job"
;).
;) ).
;).
Depends on which company they are applying to and probably what else they have online ( OSS projects with great code etc those are all also part of the "plumage").
While it means that those people have a higher chance of not being hired by "holier than thou" companies, they probably won't be a good fit in those companies anyway - might not have as much fun in those companies too
A fun company to join wouldn't care if prospective employees have photos of themself drunk wearing a silly party hat scattered amongst the social networks.
Nude beer bongs, smoking grass? I'm sure there are many bosses who have done that stuff before, and didn't think it was that bad. People hire people who are like them.
I've never done all of that, but I don't see that stuff as a huge problem, unless that person comes in smelling of grass/alcohol and looking doped/drunk then that's a very bad sign (you can always call up a bit earlier and say you can't make it for the appointment
It will hurt them if the job market is really tight, but otherwise, I don't think it's as bad as people think. Furthermore when these younger generation become CEOs and HR people, a fair number of them are probably going to think it's normal to have such pics, and might even view negatively/with suspicion people who don't let it all hang out
Now if there's evidence of them doing something vicious or malicious, in a manner where the context is hard to deny, then I think companies should think twice (esp if the culprit is the one posting it on his/her own page, unless maybe it's as an apology or something, but still...). It's kind of scary to have someone who might "snap" and bash colleagues/employees/staff, or do that just for amusement, and those traits will probably show up in other areas of their worklife.
I personally don't care if people link my posts with me. Ever since I've post stuff on the internet (more then a decade ago), I have assumed what I post can and will be linked to me. Google has thousands of hits of my posts etc.
Wouldn't you like to work with someone who was smart, not too lazy, competent AND _fun_? Maybe you can't have too many clowns around, but heck even a staid but wise HR dept might hire a "company clown" or two to brighten things up.
Seriously, enough with this bullshit about the social networking sites being the holy grail, and how they're changing the face of society, usurping Google, etc.
This is an extreme case of assuming that your peer group represents the rest of the world. Not uncommon on Slashdot, but still.... Get over yourselves.
I think you are thinking of myspoogle.
I know the rule's quite well. I insert those things randomly to drive people crazy, and to increase entropy. Or because sometimes I type too quickly and the keyboard adds it... :-)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Trouble is....99% of the companies out there are more of the holier than thou ones that you mentioned.
No we're not in the IBM everyone the same don't make waves phase thing...but, still, most companies are scared shitless of any kind of controversy. In their minds, controversy may translate into some kind of litigation down the road. And I don't see that changing much in the foreseeable future....unfortunately.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
If I gave a shit about any of those people, I'd know where they are and what they're up to. I know this about everyone I care about.
Why would I _care_ about someone I obviously drifted apart from years ago if I drifted apart from them in the first place?
Live now, not then!
"controversy may translate into some kind of litigation down the road"
Maybe the myspace partying bunch will have to move to other countries, where this isn't such a big issue.
Which would be a win-win- the US will have a higher proportion of people suited to "holier than thou" companies, just the way they like it.
For me, the "social" "push" technology that did the trick was RSS filtered aggregation. Not just web rss aggregators like Google Reader, which lets you review many feeds in a single interface, but intelligent artificial selection of the best posts from the subscribed feeds.
This allows me to create a single RSS feed where all my hundreds of subscriptions are thrown in, and the filtering provides the desired volume of good posts from those sources. The opt-in nature of RSS, combined with the machine-learning selection (based both in popularity, subject and personalization) provides the perfect balance for providing the right amount of interesting news about the subjects I care most.
I have found two services providing this kind of filtering, FeedHub and Aiderss, with competing feature sets and filtering approaches. I find them to complement fairly well.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Haven't you ever wondered what happened to your best friend from Elementary school? Your favorite acquaintances from college? It's not about chat. It is about keeping a link to people that would otherwise get left behind. As (at least in the U.S.) society becomes more mobile there is a strong desire to keep those ties. There's a lot of lonely people out there who treasure reading the blogs, hearing the music, and looking at pictures of former in-the-flesh friends.
This is one of the few good reasons why I think that we need a national ID card with track able numbers that you are supposed to give to contacts so that they can look you up.
You know what I miss most about school? Year books. I see the same people in my work place/building/going to lunch every day, but I don't know any of their names or really what any of them do. There are days that I'd like a city wide year book.
If I was running a national ID card, I'd want them issued ASAP to some one and yearly up date photos taken. If you've given school friends your public traceable number, then they'll have your name, photo, address, and maybe telephone or e-mail address.
"LOLZ" and "pwnage!"
Worse yet, all my real news will be replaced with Celebu-tard news, thanks to Perez Hilton and his ilk
I do not have a facebook page and never will.
What's a Facebook? I guess that makes me #3?
Of course, some people will argue that if you weren't keeping in touch with these people anyway, who cares what happened to them. It's a valid point. As (at least in the U.S.) society becomes more mobile there is a strong desire to keep those ties. There's a lot of lonely people out there who treasure reading the blogs, hearing the music, and looking at pictures of former in-the-flesh friends. THIS. This is what I find wrong with Facebook and the internet in general. There *are* a lot of lonely people out there. I'll agree with that. However, GET OUT OF THE MOTHERF(*&ING HOUSE/APARTMENT/BASEMENT and actually go out and meet people! Get involved in groups and activities. This whole, "living and dying by Facebook and the Blog" is a whole bunch of garbage. Is your life that sad that you have to live vicariously through your "friend's" pictures and status updates on a stupid website?!
Facebook should be about making contacts only. Life should happen outside of Facebook.
Haven't you ever wondered what happened to your best friend from Elementary school? Your favorite acquaintances from college?
No, not really. If our friendship wasn't important enough to stay in touch then it wasn't.
People should think of their web activity as being in front of a full audience while they speak all of the time. So the safest thing to do on the web is to attempt to consistently present the best image of yourself. That means that you should loudly talk about your helping homeless people and raising money for famine, and use hard copies to share your drunken nude pictures with your friends.
Then, I didn't care. I was younger and didn't appreciate others as much; I didn't think ahead or necessarily realise that I might lose touch with these people when we all went to different universities.
In some cases, I'd quite like to see them again. I'm older now (obviously) and recognise that people often have more to offer than I first thought.
Which would be a win-win- the US will have a higher proportion of people suited to "holier than thou" companies, just the way they like it."
I see this "move out of the US" meme being bandied about more and more these days...I'm guessing from people that don't live here. For the most part...most of us here like living here. Sure, the taxes are getting higher, but, they are still lower than many parts of the world. Sure we all complain here, but, honestly, we don't really want to leave, there is just still too much opportunity here and even yes, freedom. Those freedoms are erroding away, but, still we do have a chance to fight to keep them, and we also want to fight to keep jobs here, etc. I guess at the very least, yeah, it sucks in the US, but, it still sucks less than everywhere else in the world.
So..just leaving because you might have to fit more in the 'norm' really isn't a viable option. Most of us here in the US prefer to stay here...for numerous reasons.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Meme or no meme, if they can't find jobs in countries where most companies are afraid that "controversy may translate into some kind of litigation down the road", then they may have to move elsewhere if they have no other means of supporting themselves.
Personally, I think that there is a lot of goodness to being able to provide one's own dewey decimal system to enable others to track your online breadcrumbs.
It's the difference between flat files and relational database, IMHO, and could provide all sorts of interesting ways to visualize the flow of information and conversations across the web.
And while the security/privacy concerns are legitimate, the counter to this is would you rather live in a world of faux protection, where there is just a fig leaf enough of assumed coverage that laws on identity theft and macro level protections don't need to be materially updated OR have assumption that data is accessible by all and work backwards to right answer from that perspective?
Have blogged on this topic in Spock, social nets and online privacy.
Here is URL: http://thenetworkgarden.com/weblog/2007/12/spock-social-ne.html
Check it out if interested.
Mark
No. If I wanted half ass internet friends I'd get a WOW account. :P
Other choices are Gooook, Googook or Goobook.
Or, more accurately, "whole pant-load of marketing bull p00p".
I'd rather go camp in the desert or hike bits of the Grand Canyon than read about some 'tard wasting his money on the latest shiny thing from Apple or some other Evil Mega Corp.
Yeah, that's what my boyfriend says. It's more than nostalgia. I'm starting a blog with a friend from college and a woman I knew in high school. She looked up to me when I was a senior and she a freshman but that was ten years ago. Sure, I guess I could just say "fuck off" because we happened to go off to different colleges. But she turned into a brilliant woman with the same interests as me. I could read a famous blog written by strangers but I find hers as informative. Being friends with people in other cities has become acceptable through chat, at least with social networks these are people that you have at one time known. Sometimes you have watched them develop and grow.
And I like the way it is more focused than IRC. In chat, people go through the rigamarole of "How are you?...How's your job?" poking around to get at the heart of the matter. In a personal blog, the person is self-filtering through all that crap. They are only going to take the time to write about what's thrilling them at the moment, whether it's a book, a relationship, a piece of software...my point is, they decide what's important and give you all the details. And you respond if you feel like it.
The truth is keeping in touch with people is difficult. I have met some amazing people in my life. And true, I don't want to have an hour long conversation with most of them every week. It is a lower level of committment to check their page or read their blog. But these people are mostly interested in the same things I am passionate about so i want to keep up with not just them as individuals but their projects as well.
About a month ago, I saw a bulletin on myspace that a friend from college was road-tripping through my city. I offered her a place to crash and now she has decided to move here. That's not living in the past at all.
I will say though, I have enjoyed finding out what became of the first boy I ever kissed and my best friend in first grade. I don't check these pages often but if people weren't ever curious about such things, there wouldn't be high school reunions.
Wow. I would much rather voluntarily offer information to a social network than be forced to give my info to the government. Remember that the more power you give the government the easier it is for them to crush resistance when it turns oppressive.
they do nothing!
Srsly u guys. U guys, srsly.
Wow. I would much rather voluntarily offer information to a social network than be forced to give my info to the government. Remember that the more power you give the government the easier it is for them to crush resistance when it turns oppressive.
I beat you hated year book photos. Come on the government already knows all this crap. They have access to your address, DL info, tax info, as much census info as you give, and criminal history. The only thing that they don't have easy access to is your educational history.
The more that I see; the more that I'm convinced that no one cares about giving 98% of this informational stuff to the government/school/employer/or their church group. The only group that they don't want easy access to this info is casual friends, internet "friends", and those on the other side of their political side. Society needs to learn what's o.k. to be public easy to find/search and what's morally not right.
I have no moral issues against an ID card. Listening to slash dot rants against it though. Slash dot's view is a religious crusade against accurate ID information as bad as keeping evolution out of schools. Instead of discussing how as a society are going to change, folks here just whine that this change is bad/evil and we should do everything in our power to stop it. Rolls Eyes. You can't stop change.
That's pretty drastic....especially if this is a US citizen...moving to a new country isn't really like in Europe where you can pack a van and drive a few hours.
Nope....the youth of today will in general do like every generation has done before them, suck it up...and conform to the 'norm' and carry on with life. Although it will bring some changes....these are gradual. They'll then grow up, and listen to the next generation bitch about this same stuff.......and they'll give answers similar to mine...
That is the way it has worked for a LONG time...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
That doesn't mean you have to agree with it. The fury behind this crusade is that, you're right, they already do have a ton of information on us. And it has already gone way too far.
I don't know if it is a moral issue. It is a safety issue. Americans, at least are spoiled. We see a country like Iran and think, "how sad for them to live in Tyranny. That could never happen here." And that's probably what they thought in Iran too. The sheer stupidity of our trust (in the government) can be infuriating. In fact, I probably shouldn't be typing this right now...but then, where are the safe havens from the prying eyes of the CIA? Surveilance is everywhere. Dissent doesn't *feel* risky at this point. It never does until it's too late.