Facebook at 5 - Is It Growing Up Too Fast? - NYTimes.com

Facebook at 5 - Is It Growing Up Too Fast? - NYTimes.com:

"For their part, Facebook executives say they are less interested in being cool than in being a useful place where anyone can go to share elements of their lives.
“The people who started the company weren’t cool. I’m not cool,” Mr. Cox says. “If you look at the people who work here, it’s much more nerdy and curious than cool.
“Cool only lasts for so long, but being useful is something that applies to everyone.”"

This is how Facebook as a company sees itself--no longer as a place just to hang out but as a place where useful work is accomplished. But, accomplished via the social aspect relations of workers or groups of workers.

Internet evangelists say that when a technology diffuses into society, as Facebook appears to be doing, it has achieved “critical mass.” The sheer presence of all their friends, family and colleagues on Facebook creates potent ties between users and the site — ties that are hard to break even when people want to break them.
Many who have tried to free themselves of their daily Facebook habit and leave the site, like Kerry Docherty, a student at Pepperdine University’s law school, speak of a powerful gravitational pull and an undercurrent of peer pressure that eventually brings them back.

This "peer pressure" is perhaps the strongest force holding Facebook together, but--from one perspective--this may be the essence of "cool."

BBC NEWS | Technology | Bruce Sterling - Prophet and loss

BBC NEWS | Technology | Bruce Sterling - Prophet and loss:

"'People don't pay attention to novels. The socially important parts of American communication are not taking part in novels. You can write them but they are not changing public discourse.

'You can also say that everybody in society has moved up a notch and everybody just wants the executive summary.'"

I’m Not Actually a Geek

I’m Not Actually a Geek:

"Reflecting both on Schmidt’s statement, and my own use of Yammer at my company, I’m seeing that microblogging is slowly replacing a lot of my email activity.

As more companies take up microblogging with services like Yammer, Socialcast, Present.ly and SocialText Signals, employee communications amongst employees will both increase and divert away from email. Something like this:"

It seems that the element of immediacy that microblogging tools have give them an advantage over slower moving and more thought-out communications styles -- like e-mail. (And we used to complain about e-mail.)
As Hutch Carpenter continues,

Microblogging’s premise is that public proclamations of what you’re doing and information that you find are a new activity for people, and they have value. Information is shared much more easily and in-the-flow of what we’re all doing anyway. In an office setting, I continue to find the way Dave Winer describes it quite useful: narrating your work.

To what extent is all communications a status update?

Facebook's New Privacy Controls Encourage Openness - ReadWriteWeb

Facebook's New Privacy Controls Encourage Openness - ReadWriteWeb:

"As an alternative to the new 'Public Profiles' (formerly called 'Pages'), these additional settings allow you to pick and choose which parts - if any - of your private Facebook profile are available for anyone to see. According to a company blog post, this means that now people won't need to friend you in order to view the content you want to make public."

This also could be a useful feature for both teachers and students, allowing a degree of visibility and communication without crossing the border to invasion of privacy or surveillance.

Reverse Network Effect

Is There a Reverse Network Effect with Scale?:

"The Internet economy has been built on the network effect (i.e. the effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product for other people). Investors and entrepreneurs have treated this like Moore's Law. But just as Moore's Law hits physical constraints, network effects have a limit in many types of online communities. Indeed, in some cases, a reverse network effect may exist: as new people join, others are motivated to leave. This dramatically affects the length of the competitive advantage enjoyed by these ventures."

I wonder too how attempts to move a SNS like Fb away from its initial success by, for example, opening the network to those who want to sell you something increase the likelihood that the sense of community is lost, or that the value of social contacts diminishes. In other words, it is not just scale, but the types of characters that flock to the network...

Facebook's New Public Profiles: Good for Businesses, Bad for People - ReadWriteWeb

Facebook's New Public Profiles:: Good for Businesses, Bad for People"
It is difficult to keep up with the changes in Fb, but this helps illuminate some of the ways Fb is trying to change, to accommodate larger institutional users. However, this might be worth investigating as a way for smaller institutions -- e.g. a university class -- to connect to students.

The Realtime Moment

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog:

"Gillmor: We’re at the threshold of the realtime moment. The advent of a reasonably realtime message bus over public networks has changed something about the existing infrastructure in ways that are not yet important to a broad section of Internet dwellers. The numbers are adding up — 175 million Facebook users, tens of thousands of instant Twitter followers, constant texting and video chats among the teenage crowd."