

The Fakebook Generation - neilc
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/06/opinion/06mathias.html?ex=1349409600&en=2da1c3f706197a55&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

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nanijoe
People have been meeting through the web since the first web page was
made..the 'socialness' of the web was here long before facebook...facebook has
not made any shift on how people are social on the web. People have been using
things like yahoo chat, yahoo groups geocities and even newsgroups to 'hook
up' for a long time. If there is a facebook generation , is there a myspace
generation too? what about a hi5 generation..oh wait, what about a twitter
generation? Why exactly is it that people seem to set aside rational thinking
when it concerns facebook?

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rms
>Its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has even declared his quest to chart a "social
graph" of human relationships the way that cartographers once charted the
world.

Whether or not Facebook is worth 10 billion dollars on the market today as an
acquired company is irrelevant; Facebook does represent a shift in how we are
social on the internet. Hacker News does as well, but I've only met people who
are willing to meet up with me in cities other than Pittsburgh and on Facebook
they all live in Pittsburgh.

If nothing better comes along, Facebook will be worth more than 10 billion
dollars in the long run. There's also a good chance something better will come
along, and it will probably happen overnight if Google buys the old TV
frequencies and licenses space on all the old TV towers. Maybe someone smart
will figure out how to implement the semantic web by himself or with a YC
style investor.

The barriers between the web and the real world have really started to
dissolve. I know a lot of people around my age that are in long term (for 22
year olds) relationships with people they met on the internet.

The Facebook Generation is a small part of America. It's the people who went
to four year universities and their friends. For all of my age-group peers, I
use the descriptor Generation Y because I hope that generations X, Y, and Z
are the final generations of Humanity. Hopefully by the time that Generation Z
has children we will all be Post-Humans, sipping our drinks in the
enlightenment of eternity.

~~~
yters
One of the biggest ways Facebook will change the internet is giving it a trust
foundation.

~~~
hjohns
Very, very important observation. Coincidentally, the recent Wolrd Bank story
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=64367>), is quite relevant to this
thought.

------
bootload
_"... My generation has long been bizarrely comfortable with being looked at,
and as performers on the Facebook stage, we upload pictures of ourselves
cooking dinner for our parents or doing keg stands at last night's party; we
are reckless with our personal information. But there is one area of privacy
that we won't surrender: the secrecy of how and whom we search. ..."_

I listened to a sobering talk by _"Eben Moglen, 'Freedom Businesses Protect
Privacy', mp3, 18Mb, 40min"_ ~
<http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail1897.html> about just this
scenario about data and the rights to infer, think, collect, evaluate and
express. The key takeaway, these users are living with giving away their data
without contractual agreements and are ignoring the consequences.

The biggest threat to privacy is private company data miners who you freely
give data. Inference drawn the data is private property. But it's not all doom
and gloom but do you trust those who have bailment over you own data?
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailment>

_"... But there's no way Facebook would allow such a program to exist: the
site is popular largely because it enables us to indulge our gazes
anonymously. ..."_

That's not true. There is a Fb internal application that works out the
probability of 2 people who will go out together based on Fb data. So don't
bet on it.

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aston
9 months ago, we were the MySpace generation. Just saying...

