Sousveillance
Bill de hÓra Social graph aggregation and fluidity allows for better cross-selling. All those recommendation algorithms of the form “you like/bought x and y likes/bought x, you and y might have something in common” work better with larger data sets. Especially if you can jump verticals - such as connecting last.fm data to facebook. So it’s gonna happen one way or another.
Dare seems to think that the root problem is oppression by the “man”. In this case, a 23 year old. Brad seems to view this as a technical problem.
It turns out that I was a Facebook user long before the current wave started. As an alumni of the school that my son attends, Facebook provided another way to keep in contact with my son. Given what I know, I feel that technically what Brad wants to accomplish is achievable, no matter what motives Dare wants to impugn on Mark, et. al.
Data point 1: one day when logging onto Facebook, I saw an offer to scan my AIM contacts and invite the ones that had Facebooks to be friends. I unselected a few, and then clicked on submit. Within hours, my network expanded greatly. IM ids serve as useful foreign keys.
Data point 2: Facebook is a platform with an API. If there is a need, it seems to me that one could develop an application using FQL to pull one’s friend list out of Facebook and share it externally. The fact that I don’t know of such an application means one of four things is happening: (1) it exists, but I don’t know about it, (2) despite the alleged overwhelming demand for this feature, and obvious commercial opportunities it opens up, it hadn’t occurred to anyone, (3) I’m reading the documentation wrong, and it isn’t possible for applications to obtain access to one’s own Facebook ID for use as a foreign key, or (4) the demand simply isn’t there.
I personally think that #4 is a distinct possibility. There is a reason that college students refer to Facebook as Stalkerbook.
A few anecdotes. First, last year when I went to pick up my daughter from school, the line was too long so I simply went into a nearby parking lot and texted my daughter with the location. Her friend was shocked — and not at this trivial use of texting, but by the fact that my daughter’s dad actually texted. There is an expectation by the youth as to what certain technologies are to be used for. While email is for talking to parents and teachers, Facebook and texting is for teenagers. And while my two kids and one nephew are Facebook friends, I have two nieces which aren’t. The fact that I’m their Uncle Sam who merits an immediate hug whenever I’m in town does not mean that I merit access to their Facebook profiles.
Second, and perhaps more significantly, like 2,085,347 others (and counting!), my daughter has installed the Facebook Mobile application. This means that while she is out and about, she can take a picture with her cellphone, upload it, and have a dozen people comment on it before she gets home.
Among other things, this will enable the equivalent of a decentralized HollaBack function. And predictably, not everybody will be happy about that:
Not surprisingly, Hoyt himself disapproves of such tactics. In his account, the perpetrator is Nguyen, who misread his intentions ... and then humiliated him by posting his picture on the Web. He says he didn’t even realize he’d been photographed. “Even so, I wouldn’t imagine somebody throwing it up on the Internet for millions of people and destroying your life like that,” he says. “It’s one thing to take it to the police. But on the Internet, I read a lot of people saying, ‘That was not too cool of her. That was really screwed up.’ ”