facebook

Facebook killing its network pages

Sometimes when I talk with newspaper people about the value of incorporating social networking tools and techniques into their websites, I get the counterargument: Haven't Facebook and Myspace already won that battle?

Today while looking for a screenshot to use in a presentation, I had a devil of a time finding the Augusta, Ga., regional page on Facebook -- even though I'm a member of that network.

Out of desperation I finally played "guess the URL" and managed to find this:

How many social networks are too many?

In some ways, we're all multiple personalities based on context.

I am a different person in the context of my family (where, silly me, I imagine myself to be king), in the context of my wife's friends (who think I'm with the CIA because of my mysterious trips out of the country), and in my various professional roles.

So I can completely justify being in multiple social networks with multiple purposes.

But with the explosion of online social networking, I face a multiple-personality problem. How many social networks are too many?

Why wasn't Facebook invented at a J-school?

Facebook isn't journalism. It doesn't even try. But like other conversational/participative media, it's brimming with opportunity for journalism, for community-building, and for commerce.

Facebook came from a university setting and precisely targets a poorly met need in the general area of community and communications.

So why was Facebook created not inside a college of communications, but rather by a computer programmer who briefly attended Harvard?

Being silly about Facebook's valuation

Microsoft's $240 million investment in Facebook is being interpreted (by the AP, among others) as placing a $15 billion value on the whole operation.

This is silly for a number of fairly obvious reasons. Perhaps the most obvious is that Microsoft isn't trying to buy Facebook, but rather has other objectives in mind.

Anyone who has watched Microsoft for any amount of time knows the pattern: Partner, learn, copy, crush.

Pulling your data out of Facebook

As Facebook slowly opens up, it's becoming possible to pull your own data for your own purposes. Dave Winer mentioned one way, so today, in just a minute, I added a block containing my Facebook status updates to my website pages (see the column on the left). I'm not entirely thrilled with the way it displays, so I may write my own module. At the moment it's just stock Drupal RSS aggregator functionality.