This morning a Facebook friend notes that looking through her high school yearbook makes her realize what a “self-centered twit” she was then, and how embarrassed she is about it. Commenters are quick to respond that she isn’t now, and everyone is in high school anyway, and to make such other generally supportive remarks as are the norm on Facebook. In fact it wasn’t until last night on another thread that I saw the first comment I can remember having any aspect of hater-hood, and it was definitely mild compared to what you see elsewhere on the net. There are drawbacks to posting under your own name, sure, but if it helps cuts down on gratuitous nastiness it might be an idea worth catching on.
Interesting article in the most recent Wired on Facebook’s plan to supplant Google not only as center of the internet but also as its dominant transaction model. Google, it says, is fine as long as all you want is raw data, especially if you want to make money from it. Facebook in contrast aims to focus on human interaction – as much is as possible over a computer, anyway – by building a peer network that filters data via friends’ comments, analysis, recommendations etc. to the user’s comfort.
Couched like this, Facebook’s plan seems like simply a natural step in the evolution both of the net and our use of it. Google is a highly useful and largely excellent search tool, and at the very least it’s good to have the old Altavista/Yahoo/Dogpile etc. wars behind us, those were such a confusing few years, but too much of the time its search results are still way too much like the proverbial blast from a firehose when all you want is a modest drink of water. At least for me, no amount of power-user Google tips and tricks is ever going to truly change that. It’s just the nature of the internet that most of what I’m going to encounter there is going to be useless crap as far as I’m concerned. That’s a characteristic of democracy, cyber or otherwise.
Not enough filters already put in place, in other words. For people like me who aren’t too skillful at developing and/or employing them on my own, this is a problem. So I’m all for anything that will (judiciously, of course) help set up some filters I can actually use.
(And yes, I know about this Bing thing. Haven’t used it yet and don’t plan to soon because, well, fuck Microsoft for everything except Office 2008. Redmond has been way too enthusiastic about flipping off Mac users for years now and this one isn’t forgetting it.)
As of today I’m up to 130 friends on Facebook, give or take a few. I’m not so impressed with this just as a number – OK, actually I am, but only because it’s about double where I initially expected to top out - as I am with the idea that were I to request a product recommendation or financial advice or travel tip or whatever, I could theoretically get 130 pieces of advice. 130 I can theoretically handle (not that most such requests seem to get more than 5% response anyway). It’s a lot more like the water fountain that I want out of the internet.
(Of course, if you use Facebook you know that not all your friends there are necessarily what you truly consider friends, which in this context means their feedback may not be all that useful. It’s nowhere close to 100% useful even from real-life friends, so why should it be from those at the periphery? But it’s still a big step in the right direction. For a sensitive - and frequent mush-brain - like myself, filters are in the end just as important as the data that gets strained through them.)
Not that all you’re ever going to want from your Facebook is product recommendations, naturally. When I had that nasty bout of stomach flu a few months back the get-well wishes I received online were a source of great comfort. And I suppose if I were to be embarrassed by what my yearbook revealed about me years later, I might seek some feedback on that too. It’s called community, or so I hear: something that in its genuine form we could definitely use more of.
For the record, I did place a comment on my friend’s yearbook revelation. Admittedly she’s more a friend of friends than actually and we haven’t met in real life (yet), so her mileage is likely to vary considerably on the usefulness of what I wrote, but see above. It’s still the internet, after all. What I wrote was something to the effect that if there’s anything going to make someone feel like a self-centered twit, it’s a high school yearbook.
That is, next to a blog.
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