Facebook Doubletake

What the heck does anyone use Facebook for except to stalk other people? Well, according to the BBC Virtual Revolution documentary I watched with @Jemimus there are over 400 million active users on Facebook. It's the largest social networking site hosting more than 35 million user status update per day, 3 billion photo uploads per month, and 5 billion pieces of content per week (facebook statistics). This network even dwarfs my favorite site, Flickr, by a lot.

So someone like me who is heavily invested in the Metaverse has to ask what it is about this clunky, socially limiting site that actually makes it so popular. After looking at more articles on the popularity of Facebook and the site itself, I realize now why this network is so vast and most favored. It's because it DOES NOT appeal to me! It's about how the majority of people out in the "meatverse" like to connect.

Name, Age, Sex, Occupation, Favorite movie please! Sorry, no time for more exchange! Yup, that's how we interface in the RL. We're too busy, too fast pace to have the time to dig and create niche communities beyond the quick and dirty group pages. "Click Join" is a lot easier than combing the web to find people who are truly like ourselves and share the same passions. There is a great power in a global web that Facebook provides. It has allowed those in the mainstream movement of socializing to find a place on the Internet that isn't too "strange" or "eclectic" for them.

I've always looked as the Metaverse as place to delve deeper and seek branches of human thought that bloom in imagination and creativity. But the reality is that most people who take their first steps of "being online" are just looking to find the check-in counter. Where's the lobby? Facebook is the lobby. Some people will never leave this area and I think that's fine, at least they have a place to meet and greet. And hell, at least they checked in.

I won't go into the viral marketing strategy Facebook employs. I'll just say that people who gave Google Buzz such a hard time should understand that your Uncle George may not understand that it's extremely easy to get tricked into inviting his entire e-mail contact list to Facebook with just one accidental click. And while I don't get the appeal of silly beer games and farmville, I also will admit I don't get people who are into playing solitaire on their computer all day long. That is the true genius of Facebook! It ignores people like me and says, "uh.. yeah, you're not the only one. There are some people who just want to find place to keep in touch with their kids or network with their entire graduating class."

That being said, I wonder as someone who does long for more out of everything, is there a way to utilize Facebook beyond the base tool that it is? I keep meaning to experiment with the medium. Is it is as simple as consistently integrating normal web content to the Facebook page so FB users never have to leave that "lobby" and yet still access your data? Or can it be more? I guess I'm still experimenting and researching.

One of the things I find the most intriguing about Facebook is the network being used for data research. Pages have created over 5.3 billion fans of something with obvious overlap but that data and other user input I think could help generate more efficient and effective future infrastructures for communities online. Thanks to massive security flaws in Facebook, a lot of that data has been harvested and I hope something positive can come from what I perceive as stagnated space.

I created a Facebook page for MetaTalks and will be playing around with it to see if there are any potential possibilities that I may have overlooked. Sorry for the clunky URL. You don't get a simplified URL until you have more than 100 fans..something which I don't agree with because sometimes user groups for certain interests aren't really about high volume numbers. But anyhow, more importantly though, I swallowed my pride and realized it might be a tad ignorant to underestimate the power of the world's largest data pool of online metazens....even if they don't know they are part of the Meta yet. :D

Update: I was reading the PeteSearch Blog and found out he's destroying most of the data he farmed from Facebook due to legal issues. That's a shame. I kind of thought that might happen but maybe that's just his official statement and the data is still out there...somewhere.