Facebook and the "Social Graph" 200
itwbennett writes "Peter Smith is blogging about day 1 of the Facebook F8 conference and Mark Zuckerberg's vision for Facebook, which, as it turns out, is somewhat confusing: 'Zuckerberg clearly sees Facebook as a service. Facebook Connect (the name) is going away and being replaced by the Facebook Platform. "Share on Facebook" buttons are being replaced with "Like on Facebook" buttons. And Comcast is now called Xfinity. ... What does it all mean to the end user? There's a new API to fetch data from Facebook more easily, which sounds great, if only I could figure out why I'd want to do that. The overall tone of the keynote was that Facebook was serious business and they were going to build the Social Graph, a vast network of connections between people and the things they like. Zuckerberg was a man with a mission.'"
Facebook (Score:2, Insightful)
is for chumps. I don't understand how people can give away ALL of their information like that.
and again.... (Score:5, Insightful)
no mention of user security ANYWHERE.
That's the biggest peeve I have with facebook/myspace, et al. They don't take the end users' security into consideration.
That's the #1 reason why I don't use their services. Otherwise, for a ton of people, they're fantastic services.
Re:Facebook (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Facebook (Score:1, Insightful)
Want to know what's much more social and stores none of your information for random strangers forever? Hanging out with your friends. It also happens to be the fastest way to exchange detailed information with them too!
Haters (Score:5, Insightful)
He missed the message. The internet is full of haters and he isn't providing a dislike button.
If I like a song on Pandora, it can link to my Facebook profile. Great, I can spam my wall and annoy my friends even more!
Facebook is the single most popular site on the world, in spite of itself. All they do is piss off their users. Some day it will blow up in their face when someone launches something better.
Re:Facebook (Score:5, Insightful)
Because we are social. We need social contact. If being social means having a profile on facebook so you'd connect with your friends, most people(whether they know the risks or not) will have one.
That's not real contact, though. It's a one way broadcast contact.
It's one thing to keep up with distant friends - it's a hell of a lot cheaper than phone calls, but in many cases it's a replacement for in person contact - even if folks are local. Sure, there are folks who use it to say "Hey, I'm at Joe's Tavern tonight, come and join me!" but others?
Facebook is pseudo social contact and I think it's actually making us more isolated as a people. We evolved to communicate one on one - not via a computer terminal.
Re:Facebook (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Facebook (Score:3, Insightful)
I realize the OP was being a troll, but please mod the parent up. /.ers need this awareness. Facebook is not for /.ers, it is for our mom's and our SOs. The ones who don't understand why a cryptographically hard password is important.
Because we are social
Re:Facebook (Score:5, Insightful)
That's nice, but only works in a romanticized version of reality. Almost all of my friends live hundreds of miles away. I don't care for most of my cow-orkers, and have little time available to do much with my friends who live nearby because I have a schedule to maintain with my kids and my friends work different hours than I do. There's a ridiculous number of reasons why for many people it is difficult to actually spend a lot of time hanging out with friends IRL, and probably just as many to justify keeping in touch via social media. For many, it's almost like we're integrating technology into our lives to give us more ways to keep in contact with people who physical world constraints make hard to spend face time with.
Great. (Score:5, Insightful)
Now when I go to CNN.com I suddenly find information about my "friends" and their activities on CNN.com. I don't want to see this shit. And I sure as hell don't want my "friends" (keeping in mind that the several hundred FB-friends I have aren't particularly my real 'friends' anyway) seeing what I do on CNN.com.
The worst thing - this is happening even though I disabled the only privacy setting on Facebook that I could find related to sharing information with third party websites. And even though I never opted in to Facebook Connect or connected CNN.com to Facebook.
Also, CNN does not seem to have a function to disable this 'wonderful' sharing feature. The only way I could disable it was to log out of my Facebook account manually on Facebook.com. I didn't have a browser open at Facebook mind you, I just had a cookie in my browser from having logged into Facebook earlier this morning at the office.
So now Facebook forces me to log out manually every time I leave the site lest I be barraged with Facebook content on other, completely unrelated, websites. Thanks, but no fucking thanks. I guarantee I won't be logging into Facebook anywhere near as often any more since they've made their service an utter pain in the ass now.
Call me a grumpy old 30-year old man if you will. I probably am. Get off my lawn and all that. But seriously, I was an early adopter of Facebook, and before that of Friendster. I enjoy seeing a little bit of mindless drivel from my acquaintances and the like out there, and keeping in touch on my terms is nice, but it has to be on my terms. I'm not interested in having my web browsing at work be a social experience - I prefer to keep my "social experiences" sandboxed to the websites they originate from, thank you very much.
Quote FTW (Score:2, Insightful)
Dude, fuck Facebook. Seriously. - Stan Marsh
Re:and again.... (Score:4, Insightful)
One of the company's key areas of expertise are in "data mining technologies". Do you really *think* they're THAT concerned with your security, given the situation?
Look, we as nerds must STOP treating "data mining" like an epithet, or at least a scarlet letter on one's resume. The term has been abused by the popular media in connection with the NSA's wiretapping, but people tend to overlook the fact that "data mining" is just a bunch of algorithms to find statistical patterns in different kinds of data. When it's referred to as "exploratory data analysis", no one seems to mind. When it's referred to as simply "applied statistics", no one seems to mind. Read the statement [sigkdd.org] by ACM's data mining special interest group, SIGKDD.
That said, I completely agree with you -- of course Facebook is interested in mining the social graph and f***ing it for all its worth. They're a for-profit company whose only asset is detailed information about people and their interactions. Why is anyone shocked that they don't want to make the world a better place, and would rather become very rich instead off their only asset. For a capitalist country, a lot of nerds in the US seem to have rose-colored glasses on.
Social Spam (Score:5, Insightful)
In theory, a 'clean' social networking site would simple allow people to communicate with exactly who they want in a manner that is explicitly controllable, giving that user the ability to control the exact verbosity of their messages and their communication scope. Facebook is eliminating the paradigm of private opinions, and the more laymen that sign up, more noise pervades the wire.
The draw, the appeal have you, is simple. If you can quantize 'friendships' and social-connections, people now have a semi-definable metric that they sub-consciously always try to improve, this is human nature. People seek others to listen to their opinions, and therefore the underlying motivation on Facebook is that drives people to produce so much noise is this need to be heard, even if what they have to say is completely worthless from a societal contribution standpoint. Its easy. You just post, and Facebook does the rest. If I am giving a speech to room full of empty people, I know nobody will hear it. But if I am printing my speech on millions of fliers and jetting them all over the world, their is that chance that somebody will effectively 'hear' me. Facebook provides, the pen, the paper, the microphone, the jet, and fuel, they own the airlines, they own the airports, and now they want to connect their 'communication hub' to every-other preexisting communication hub so that you can see that Joe Schmoe just mowed his lawn or Pookie made a cute face while she crapped on the apartment floor.
Fuck. That. Shit.
Re:Great. (Score:4, Insightful)
Easy solution: remove all your facebook "friends" who are not real friends.
Re:Great. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Facebook (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the point was that to date we have spent millions of years evolving to maximize our face to face social interactions. The relatively instant replacement of that with "social networks" is not something that we have evolved to cope with, and so has a disruptive effect on our lives and social interactions.
If those social networks persist for an extended period of time than we may certainly evolve to maximize them. However, evolution happens by selection through successful reproduction. As this is most certainly a face to face activity, in person social skills will likely remain paramount.
Re:Facebook (Score:3, Insightful)
So you're saying we should all move to your city? My whole country doesn't have enough people for two of those cities. And I bet in your country there are people who live in less populated zones...
Me too. But I do have friends who I have met in real life, but due to time constrains I can only hang out with on weekends. I don't see the problem with talking to them online on the rest of week.
I find Facebook flawed in multiple ways, but saying all online communication is impersonal and wrong is foolish.
Re:Facebook (Score:3, Insightful)
You are correct. it's not for /.'ers its for people that want to connect with others. I use it as a brand building tool and networking tool, same as my linked-in. I only post to my facebook positive things that build my "brand" to the point that I have over the past few years turned into a minor celebrity in some circles. A lot of people know of me that I don't know and they know my work, cripes little ol' me has 1500 fans on my fan page. It helps because only friends are on my page and everyone else sees my fan page. that allows me to insulate my private data stream from my public facing data stream.
THAT is what Facebook is really good at. mix in a twitter feed, youtube channel, and a "blog" that couples all together... and you have a HUGE brand building network.
It's also why I never even interviewed for my current job... I was contacted, they made an offer, I accepted and started. No interview, no Send your resume, no fill out a application...
p.s. : keep your social life not linked or not easily linked to your professional public facing world.
Re:and again.... (Score:3, Insightful)
What's shocking is that everyone knows Facebook does this crap and uses their service anyway.
Why is that shocking? Maybe users have *gasp* different priorities than you do! I know, it's shocking!
For example, I don't care that Facebook knows the people I'm related to. They provide me a service, and I pay them by providing them with information they deem valuable. I consider that an equitable trade. Who the hell are you to decide I can't make that judgment for myself?
Frankly, I'm continually amused by how much smarter Slashdotters think they are than the general public, and how they seem to believe they know what's best for them. So much for that supposed libertarian streak around here...
Re:Facebook (Score:3, Insightful)
Everytime Facebook is mentioned here, a lot of people seem to create this strange stupid type of person who has 5 million friends on Facebook and talks to no one in real life. The fallacy of this is that the "person" being nerdraged against is a construct, it's easy to get mad at Facebook when you think these types of people exist and they are forced into their predicament by Zuckerberg's personal schutzstaffel. How about Slashdotter's stop freaking out about non-nerds communicating online and trying to explain from their position as a fucking Slashdot commenter that internet communication is inherently wrong.
Re:and again.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Look, we as nerds must STOP treating "data mining" like an epithet, or at least a scarlet letter on one's resume.
Look, we as nerds must STOP latching on to one facet of an argument, or at least representing it as the entire argument. The difference is DM in the context of ex-CIA, not DM in general. Relax, coffeeboy.
Re:Haters (Score:4, Insightful)
He missed the message. The internet is full of haters and he isn't providing a dislike button.
I think you missed the point: Corporations want to know what you like, they don't care about what you dislike.
Re:Facebook (Score:3, Insightful)
Want to know what's much more social and stores none of your information for random strangers forever? Hanging out with your friends. It also happens to be the fastest way to exchange detailed information with them too!
Question: From where I am (Florida), how do I hang out with my friends, school buddies and relatives in California, Massachusetts, Georgia, Yokohama and Central America? Or do they stop being friends and relatives the moment they are no longer within spitting distance? It got to suck in a very insular way to not have people you care to hang out with but are very far away, in this modern, mobile and to a point, nomadic nation of ours. Either that, or you live in a cow town where everybody you know and care for enough to hang out with stays and dies on the same spot.
Here you are making the leap of thinking that all that information is available to random strangers (when in fact, that only happens if you consciously fiddle your privacy settings to make everything public.) Most people in Facebook do not do that, and, unlike Myspace (and the friend-whoring it seems to support), these same facebook users tend to keep visibility open only to actual friends, relatives and co-workers.
I'm a facebooker myself, some of my information is accessible by every one; other just to those I connect with. Fact is, I'm only connected with family, relatives and people I actually know. It's been the best thing since e-mail to keep in touch with relatives and friends thousands of miles away. With people that I've lost contact 10-15 years ago (by virtue of finishing school and/or migration) we have been able to re-found each others.
With it, and with skype, they have been great tools to communicate with faraway friends and family. It's the only way my grandma in Nicaragua and my in-laws in Japan can get regular, daily updates on my baby's growth. Networking sites are some of the best things that have come from the Internet in terms of human interaction.
When people start seeing those as ZOMG, GEEK+ATTENTIONWHORE, BASEMENT! ditching advise about getting out, that's just projecting.