

World's Largest Social Network - The Open Web - grellas
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/business/16digi.html?hp

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shadowsun7
Brilliant article.

The Facebook model of human connection/communication is a largely terrible
one, if you think about it. Clicking buttons and games and wall posts aren't a
reflection of how the real-world model of communication works - and aside from
distracting you on a day-to-day basis, the model replaces some of your most
important connections with the illusion of intimacy.

I'd much rather call and set up a lunch-date for the people I truly care about
than to follow the trickle of updates on their Facebook profiles for a year.
Updates are superficial, and splintered, and distracting.

This may, of course, be personal preference, but consider: the Facebook
profiles I know tend to become echo chambers at a rate far higher than that of
blogs and personal sites. This rarely - if ever - happens in real life.

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metamemetics
> _Facebook profiles I know tend to become echo chambers at a rate far higher
> than that of blogs and personal sites_

I rarely if ever update my Facebook profile, but I still think it's a
_fantastic_ site for networking, finding events, and looking up email
addresses. I completely disagree with the article that blogs\personal sites
and facebook accounts are substitutable goods in competition with each other.
For many users, they are in entirely different product categories.

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Retric
Yes, but you don't use Facebook to communicate, you use it to facilitate other
forms of communication. IMO, even as you praise it your actions recognize how
limited it is as a communications medium.

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silkodyssey
The open web is a network of information while facebook is a network of
people. Social is about interaction between people so I disagree that the open
web is more social. The open web may be more connected but facebook is more
social because the connections are mainly between people. And while facebook
is in many ways a closed system it is weaving itself seamlessly into the
fabric of the web with the open graph initiative. Search engines may not be
able to crawl facebook directly but through it's graph api website developers
can access that information.

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joubert
Perhaps the open web is more social in the same way going to a party where you
meet new people is more social than just hanging out with the same people all
the time.

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zppx
And our social habits are not structured in the same way that Facebook
presents it to us, the unstructured "Open Web" is closer to real life.

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metamemetics
> _Susan Herring, professor of information science at Indiana University, sees
> it this way: “What the statistics point to is a rise in Facebook, a decline
> in blogging, and before that, a decline in personal Web pages. The trend is
> clear, she said — Facebook is displacing these other forms of online
> publication.["]_

Can anyone verify this claim? Are active blogs decreasing or is the growth
rate of new blogs just slowing?

If it's just a slump in the creation rate of new blogs, perhaps it's because
the proliferation of blogging tools a few years ago made it much easier for
people to start blogging, and it hasn't been getting easier because it's
aready really easy?

If anything, I would predict the viral nature of Facebook gets new types of
people accusttomed to sharing information online, and would lead to more blogs
by increasing the number of would be bloggers to offset any decrease it might
cause by providing its own sharing platform.

