The evolution of a facebook
by Jason LiDuring my two years in college, my friends and I would occasionally flip through our class year’s face book.
No, not facebook.com, but the actual physical soft cover booklet called the Class Album: new students face book. Each page had nine black and white photographs, and each photograph had a name under it. We would flip through it, muttering things to ourselves like, “Oh, I know that person”, “Who’s that?”, “Wow I nearly didn’t recognize him” and the inevitable, “Dude, she’s hot.”
Then came facebook.com (or thefacebook.com as it was first called).
Instead of skimming page upon page of old high school photographs, trying to decide whether he/she was someone I’d want to meet, I could access entire profiles of information. And I could see if someone was Single, In a Relationship, In an Open Relationship, Engaged, Married, or Complicated.
We could now scurry home, open our laptops, and check out That Stranger From Class. What was her major? Who did we know in common? What kinds of movies did she like? And, is she single? This replaced the Hot Or Not aspect of the old physical face book, and people flocked to register. Back then, registering a Facebook account was relatively simple: there were no applications, no news feeds, no events, and not even a wall.
Facebook announced recently that profiles would soon be searchable from Google. As it opens itself up to the world, will it become a face book for the world? Or will the idea of a face book crumble once it is taken out of college campuses?
Credits to Frank Yu for pointing out the face book to Facebook design metaphor.
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September 18th, 2007 at 10:09 pm
Personally I think that a global ‘facebook’ (not necessarily the .com) is one of the most obvious outstanding information needs today. I’m not sure if facebook(.com) is up to the challenge, but I cheer for anyone who makes the attempt to provide a sort of white pages that treats me, Bill Gates, and my real estate agent in a similar fashion (while of course acknowledging our respective acomplishments).
Frankly, I’m surprised that Google hasn’t stepped up to the plate on this one. If there’s a single realm in which the world’s information has yet to be “organized and made universally accessible and useful”, it’s a directory of human beings.
September 19th, 2007 at 2:29 pm
But that is what myspace and linkedin are for.
I opposed facebook being open to the public, because myspace and friendster took care of that already. I was much more comfortable with the community aspect of it, rather than the networks that exist now e.g. The New York network.
Granted, you can’t see the profile of the person until they approve you as a friend, but it’s just one step into taking away what facebook was made for: school/community/interest networks.
And if facebook becomes searchable via Google….well that makes me really uncomfortable.
One of the things i liked about facebook vis-a-vis myspace was that the interface is/was standardized. Using both past and present tense here because now there are a zillion new doodads and applications that people add, but the color schematic is still the same. I hope they don’t go overboard with the applications, but who knows what will happen.
In contrast, myspace is all over the place. People who have no idea how to design a webpage or who have no idea what color/font would go with a background go nuts with it. The result is barely readable profiles, music on loop, 4,234892049832 photos, and a scrolling nightmare.
I completely got off topic there, but back to the original discussion, facebook definitely made things fun in my college years. I’m sure it will continue to be so and of course be an invaluable resource for keeping in touch with people you’ve had a mutual experience with in the past.