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Facebook and the "Social Graph"
itwbennett writes "Peter Smith is blogging about day 1 of the Facebook F8 conference and Mark Zuckerberg's vision for Facebook, which, as it turns out, is somewhat confusing: 'Zuckerberg clearly sees Facebook as a service. Facebook Connect (the name) is going away and being replaced by the Facebook Platform. "Share on Facebook" buttons are being replaced with "Like on Facebook" buttons. And Comcast is now called Xfinity. ... What does it all mean to the end user? There's a new API to fetch data from Facebook more easily, which sounds great, if only I could figure out why I'd want to do that. The overall tone of the keynote was that Facebook was serious business and they were going to build the Social Graph, a vast network of connections between people and the things they like. Zuckerberg was a man with a mission.'"
no mention of user security ANYWHERE.
That's the biggest peeve I have with facebook/myspace, et al. They don't take the end users' security into consideration.
That's the #1 reason why I don't use their services. Otherwise, for a ton of people, they're fantastic services.
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Because we are social. We need social contact. If being social means having a profile on facebook so you'd connect with your friends, most people(whether they know the risks or not) will have one.
He missed the message. The internet is full of haters and he isn't providing a dislike button.
If I like a song on Pandora, it can link to my Facebook profile. Great, I can spam my wall and annoy my friends even more!
Facebook is the single most popular site on the world, in spite of itself. All they do is piss off their users. Some day it will blow up in their face when someone launches something better.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Because we are social. We need social contact. If being social means having a profile on facebook so you'd connect with your friends, most people(whether they know the risks or not) will have one.
That's not real contact, though. It's a one way broadcast contact.
It's one thing to keep up with distant friends - it's a hell of a lot cheaper than phone calls, but in many cases it's a replacement for in person contact - even if folks are local. Sure, there are folks who use it to say "Hey, I'm at Joe's Tavern tonight, come and join me!" but others?
Facebook is pseudo social contact and I think it's actually making us more isolated as a people. We evolved to communicate one on one - not via a computer terminal.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Since when our social interaction were rational ? There is no point in rationalising this for the human majority. If putting information about themselves on a site so they'd connect with people is what's required , they would do it. They see this as a way of being capable of interacting with more people using less time. Question, how many(of active) profiles have a friend list under 20 friends? I would suppose not a lot, I would even go as far as saying probably very rare. People want to meet more people(in general) and online social interaction can give you something of that in less time. So people put the information there, so people would see it.
That's nice, but only works in a romanticized version of reality. Almost all of my friends live hundreds of miles away. I don't care for most of my cow-orkers, and have little time available to do much with my friends who live nearby because I have a schedule to maintain with my kids and my friends work different hours than I do. There's a ridiculous number of reasons why for many people it is difficult to actually spend a lot of time hanging out with friends IRL, and probably just as many to justify keeping in touch via social media. For many, it's almost like we're integrating technology into our lives to give us more ways to keep in contact with people who physical world constraints make hard to spend face time with.
Now when I go to CNN.com I suddenly find information about my "friends" and their activities on CNN.com. I don't want to see this shit. And I sure as hell don't want my "friends" (keeping in mind that the several hundred FB-friends I have aren't particularly my real 'friends' anyway) seeing what I do on CNN.com.
The worst thing - this is happening even though I disabled the only privacy setting on Facebook that I could find related to sharing information with third party websites. And even though I never opted in to Facebook Connect or connected CNN.com to Facebook.
Also, CNN does not seem to have a function to disable this 'wonderful' sharing feature. The only way I could disable it was to log out of my Facebook account manually on Facebook.com. I didn't have a browser open at Facebook mind you, I just had a cookie in my browser from having logged into Facebook earlier this morning at the office.
So now Facebook forces me to log out manually every time I leave the site lest I be barraged with Facebook content on other, completely unrelated, websites. Thanks, but no fucking thanks. I guarantee I won't be logging into Facebook anywhere near as often any more since they've made their service an utter pain in the ass now.
Call me a grumpy old 30-year old man if you will. I probably am. Get off my lawn and all that. But seriously, I was an early adopter of Facebook, and before that of Friendster. I enjoy seeing a little bit of mindless drivel from my acquaintances and the like out there, and keeping in touch on my terms is nice, but it has to be on my terms. I'm not interested in having my web browsing at work be a social experience - I prefer to keep my "social experiences" sandboxed to the websites they originate from, thank you very much.
I find it easiest to not participate. When I was in high-school and Facebook was just a whisper, during the times in which the only allowed users had to have educational email addresses, it was a platform for communication. Now it has become a micro-blogging service on the public side, so people can quantitatively spew their opinions via 'like' or, well, frankly, 'like'. Facebook is a platform of subjective opinions, coalescing, as a previous poster states precisely, into a a very large amount of noise compared to a very small amount of signal.
In theory, a 'clean' social networking site would simple allow people to communicate with exactly who they want in a manner that is explicitly controllable, giving that user the ability to control the exact verbosity of their messages and their communication scope. Facebook is eliminating the paradigm of private opinions, and the more laymen that sign up, more noise pervades the wire.
The draw, the appeal have you, is simple. If you can quantize 'friendships' and social-connections, people now have a semi-definable metric that they sub-consciously always try to improve, this is human nature. People seek others to listen to their opinions, and therefore the underlying motivation on Facebook is that drives people to produce so much noise is this need to be heard, even if what they have to say is completely worthless from a societal contribution standpoint. Its easy. You just post, and Facebook does the rest. If I am giving a speech to room full of empty people, I know nobody will hear it. But if I am printing my speech on millions of fliers and jetting them all over the world, their is that chance that somebody will effectively 'hear' me. Facebook provides, the pen, the paper, the microphone, the jet, and fuel, they own the airlines, they own the airports, and now they want to connect their 'communication hub' to every-other preexisting communication hub so that you can see that Joe Schmoe just mowed his lawn or Pookie made a cute face while she crapped on the apartment floor.
Fuck. That. Shit.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
We evolved to communicate one on one - not via a computer terminal.
Says the man posting on Slashdot
You don't use NoScript, do you? Because if you did, you'd see that his "dream" is Google's reality. google-analytics.com is *everywhere*.
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Facebook is pseudo social contact and I think it's actually making us more isolated as a people. We evolved to communicate one on one - not via a computer terminal.
See, here's the problem. Facebook isn't meant to replace social contact; it's meant to enhance it. When Zuckerberg and company began developing facebook (before the 'f' was capitalized, of course), their main impetus for doing so was to develop an easy way for people in Harvard to know and keep in contact with each other. Since college students would prefer anything online over in print, it made it a much better alternative than using the actual face-book that Harvard publishes every year (which I think they still do). On top of that, it provided a medium to allow people to contact each other easily. It was way better than digging through and through to find someone's email address, let alone their phone number. This obviously proved to be way more advantageous than finding people, as attested by the outrageous growth it's experienced since it went live in 2004.
Unfortunately, making communication easier naturally implies some form of increased isolation. However, would you really consider that mitigation a disadvantage if that simplification makes your life easier? Calling people makes it easier for me to not talk to the person face-to-face, but would you doubt that the phone is a terrible way to communicate with people because of that?
I own a Facebook profile, and have accumulated a ton of friends over the years on it. Now, in reality, I only know a handful of those folks...but having tons of Facebook friends sure makes it easy to find something to do on a quiet Friday/Saturday night if I'm up for it. Which, of course, makes it easy to make real acquaintances (or friends that stick around, if I get lucky).
I agree that FB communication is a poor surrogate for face to face in person communication, however speaking from an American societal view, allowing people to communicate freely without some of the awkwardness or judgment based on physical appearances may allow people to "connect" with others and exchange ideas more freely.
Group social interaction and the sharing of ideas is what drives our society and civilization. To imply that the only way to do that is via "facetime" is not only naive, but its a little ignorant.
Yes body language can account for a significant amount of "communication" but it can also impede the sharing of ideas.
Personally I see FB as the next logical evolution to online disucssion forums and IRC chatrooms. The body language issue is largely negated through the use of "emoticons" and other memes, not to mention things like skype which I can tell you from experience, is an EXCELLENT alternative to face to face communication.
Ultimately FB allows more communication easier which will naturally lead to more physical interactions. The idea that just because you met someone on the internet discounts the possibility of being "friends" in real life is foolish. It's really no different than meeting someone on the train or in the grocery store. They are just as likely to be an axe murderer as the person you met online. The only difference is the method by which you were initially introduced. The same social rules and personal safety habits still apply and I think THAT is the larger issue. The internet has invaded every part of our lives at all levels. As a species we are still adjusting and evolving to take advantage of the new tools and communication avenues that have recently been created.
Facebook does a good job of being a "social network" for keeping up with your real-world friends. But if that's all you use it for, Facebook doesn't make any money. It's all that "casual gaming" and "fanning" that brings in the revenue. Connecting up with a game or becoming a "fan" of some commercial content sucks all your private data into some game operator's system.
Google conquered a similar problem. Organic search makes Google no money. Google's business is being an ad agency.
someone you actually spend time with
anyone you only share stuff on the internet with: they are just an acquaintance, not a friend
and if you insist that such acquaintances really ARE your friends, then you are a shallow person who has no real true friends, whether you realize it or not
lose facebook and gain real friends and real depth of character. or continue with the empty mask and the fake charade and the pointless surface level chatter and call that a "life". your choice
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