Facebook is FINE.

I just started really using Facebook… well, yesterday. And as I used it, I began to understand the vision its founders have for the site. Or something. Maybe it’s the fact that I got close to 20 hours of sleep yesterday (figure that out).

But Facebook is lining up to be the next internet, the way MySpace is sort of the youth internet right now. Sure, to my younger brothers and sisters, there are neat things that happen outside of MySpace, but they’re just some neat things. The meat of everything happens in the interactions between profiles and the additions to them, the gaining of friends, the miscellanea. Sort of the way the blogosphere works for us bloggers.

But Facebook is better than MySpace because it minimizes the amount of customizing that people can do, and instead of focusing on individuality and letting everyone glitter their profile up to high heaven, it concentrates on interconnectivity. This is a good thing. The News Feed page is a really, really good thing.

For instance, all my friends and I have blogs. But reading 100 blogs a day is a pain. So we aggregate (I, for instance, use Google Reader), and the content gets pushed to us. But what if you want to comment? You can’t comment via RSS, so you have to visit the blog, which is a barrier to entry, so to speak. (I personally think aggregation reduces commenting.) What blogs lack is a unified method of communication with eachother - a framework for interaction, if you wish. HTML doesn’t provide this. There’s nothing wrong with having ten thousand different blog sites and types of blog software, but what would really help the blogosphere become more social is enabling users to see what’s going on the way social networking sites do. Or the way Facebook does really, really well.

This is, of course, rather tangential to my main point. But what if Facebook expanded its reach just a little? It’s already got a note-creation mechanism that a lot of people use as a type of blogging space; what if Facebook allowed me to set up an incoming RSS feed that copies content from my main blog as it is updated? That would be neat. It could circumvent the blog integration problem altogether. Friends would get updates in their News Feeds, and could comment from there. Sure, it would create an abstracted layer of comments, but I’m not sure Facebook users would care that much.

It’s just an idea. In any case, I have to take a shower and go to church. Or as my crazy sister and her husband would say, I have to take a shower so I can have the privilege of going to church. And I would add, smelling less like roadkill than I do now.

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Posted December 31st, 2006 in main. Tagged: .

6 comments:

  1. Geof F. Morris:

    Dan: You can import any feed—but only one!—into Facebook’s Notes function. I import the GFMorris.net feed that Planet rolls for me, a feed that aggregates everything I publish, for the most part. How else do you think I have 200+ Notes in Facebook? ;)

    December 31st, 2006 at 8:59 am
  2. daniel:

    DAMMIT! You’re as right as rain.

    I also hadn’t noticed you had a plethora of notes.

    But now that I know this, I guess my guess for what their vision for Facebook is isn’t that far off, eh?

    d

    December 31st, 2006 at 1:05 pm
  3. Roger:

    I’m always behind the times.

    December 31st, 2006 at 1:41 pm
  4. Geof F. Morris:

    Dan: Well, in some ways. I wouldn’t argue that Facebook is trying to replace the Internet, but they are trying to create a network of networks, one that interoperates with lots of things. They don’t seem interested in creating a fully-walled garden, but they do let you put up fences about your little pieces of it as you like. All in all, it’s really pretty well-done. [Even if the college kids complain when you let outsiders in. If nothing else, all the young kids are learning about privacy on the Internet and the lack thereof. Good lesson!]

    BTW, this entry plus my work today to put up some photos did inspire me to beg Flickr and Facebook for some interoperability.

    December 31st, 2006 at 2:04 pm
  5. *daniel:

    Geof, what I meant when I said it was aiming to be the internet was that the service becomes AS essential as the internet is to us to its users. If that makes any sense whatsoever.

    d

    January 1st, 2007 at 12:07 am
  6. Geof F. Morris:

    I get ya. And … ironically, if they succeed, they’ll do what AOL was unable to do: create a community-focused subset of the Internet that is indispensible to its users.

    January 1st, 2007 at 12:57 am

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