Facebook, you don't know me.

Facebook has unveiled a mockup of their new home page, which looks like an improvement at first glance. There's new features for filtering out the noise and showing just what means most to you. I like that.

Then I saw the new "Hilights" section and rolled my eyes. It's not surprising that Facebook would move towards pushing content to its users. It's more surprising that it's taken them so long to get around to that. It's the way that they're doing it that makes me cringe.

Featured photos, events, notes and more that you don't want to miss. Stories are chosen based on what your friends have interacted with.

[My emphasis]

In the early days of TiVo, users complained about the heavily played up profile feature that automatically recorded programs that it thought its users would want to see, without them explicitly specifying such programs, based on what they had watched before. It sounded like a good feature, that is until TiVo decided they were gay.

Look, Facebook, here's the thing. You don't know me. And you're not going to find out what I like using some algorithm that analyzes what my friends click on. I don't really have much in common with my friends (even the real ones, not just the ones I recruited to help me kick ass in Mob Wars). I like my friends exactly because of our differences. I tried to hang out with people who are like me and it was just annoying, probably because I often annoy myself.

I've got some weird friends too, into some weird things. It's fine that they're into weird things, they're my friends, but I don't really go there myself, you know? No, you don't know. And that's the point. You're just a super-computer sitting out there running statistics to see how many of my friends watch a certain television show. If enough of them are lesbians and watch The L Word, somehow that means I'm a lesbian too?

Dude, you seriously don't know me, so stop pretending that you do.

Oh, and by the way, you suck at pushing content anyway. All those people you think I might know sitting over there on the side of your old home page... I didn't know any of them. That creepy looking guy with the mean mug that you left up there for three months thinking I might know him, though after hundreds of page loads your algorithm should of guessed that I didn't, well, he's just creepy. Please don't push me any content he clicked on.

Thanks.

I take back what I said about Twitter

In "Depth web versus shallow web", I argued that the social-blurbing system called Twitter was devoid of any real substance, shallow, and ultimately pointless beyond logging every random thought one may have. I take that all back. Thanks to Twitter, an American journalism student was able to free himself from an Egyptian jail.

James Karl Buck helped free himself from an Egyptian jail with a one-word blog post from his cell phone.

Buck, a graduate student from the University of California-Berkeley, was in Mahalla, Egypt, covering an anti-government protest when he and his translator, Mohammed Maree, were arrested April 10.

On his way to the police station, Buck took out his cell phone and sent a message to his friends and contacts using the micro-blogging site Twitter.

The message only had one word. "Arrested."

Within seconds, colleagues in the United States and his blogger-friends in Egypt -- the same ones who had taught him the tool only a week earlier -- were alerted that he was being held.

Within twenty-four hours he was released, upon which he again Twittered a one-word message: "Freed."

My bad, Twitter. Sometimes a blurb is all that's needed. Keep up the good work.

Source (Thanks Tracie)

All the little ants are marching

I quit my volunteer job/addiction of editing Wikipedia articles. Normally when someone quits, they write up a departing essay pointing out all the things wrong with the web sub-culture of wiki, namely all the things wrong with pages anyone can edit. Some of the popular critiques of social media are the lack of expert opinion and the opportunity for special interest groups to push a particular point of view, two things traditional media tries to avoid (often failing). I don't know about any of that. After two years of editing on a regular basis, I'm still a fan of the idea of Wikipedia. As I wrote in an essay some time ago:

Wikipedia is a mainstream encyclopedia, wrapped up in and documenting popular culture. It also has the unique characteristic of being an encyclopedia that anyone can edit, which means that it is edited by the masses who draw on their experiences of living in popular culture.

I'm personally fascinated by the dynamic between the established popular culture, and counterculture movements. MediaWiki itself is an experiment in countering the culture of traditional publishing. Though I was born decades later, I enjoy reading histories of the counterculture movements in the United States during the 1960s.

It really is fascinating, a system designed to chronicle pop culture, built on counterculture concepts. What a mashup! I am still, totally, a fan of the site. You won't be hearing any rant coming from me.

No, the reason I quit is actually one of the things I think is a plus of social media; it's just something I'm not personally cut out for. While at Wikipedia, through my (ahem) superior writing skills, I assisted in getting one of the articles to Featured Article status. By assisted I mean I wrote a significant portion of it myself. I had contributed towards a number of articles, hundreds of edits actually, but this one held a special place on Wikipedia, the highest status. I was rather proud of my accomplishment and set back to marvel at my work.

A few weeks later someone came in and changed a few words around. Not a significant change, but not the wording I would have chosen, and so it was mildly irritating. No big deal, so I let it go. A few more changes here and there. I let it go. Some other guy thought it needed to be rewritten completely, and I had to argue for the current version. He eventually let it go, and so did I. But more and more as time went on, the idea that I was somehow "finished" with the article became less and less true. Wikipedia is built on process, not product.

This is a very cool thing and the defining thing that separates web media from print media. You write, say, a book and have it printed. Once those presses start rolling that thing is set in stone, and you have to wait for a second edition (if ever) to correct any part of it or make any improvements. Not so on the web, obviously. Web documents can be updated, modified, fixed, all at a moment's notice. No more is this apparent than at Wikipedia, the "Encyclopedia Anyone Can Edit". Thousands of editors participate in the process, and as such, Wikipedia is an ever evolving phenomenon. It is a living document.

I could hardly be pissed at that. That's beautiful. It reminds me of an ant hill after a storm has wiped through. You see dozens of little ants scurrying about, rebuilding, modifying, growing the hill, all so it can be wiped out in the next storm. It's about process, not product. Nothing is ever "finished" because that was never really the point to begin with. It's about the process of living, and big surprise, it's not that different in a living document.

I am a fan of the idea. It's just hard for me personally. Though it's not very Zen, I've always had trouble with the maintenance side of life. Mowing the lawn and watching it grow. Mowing the lawn and watching it grow. Mowing the lawn and... what the hell? I just mowed it the other day! I'm very product-orientated. I'm not saying any of that is better because it probably isn't. It's just more my style. I'd like to be in Zen harmony with the ebb and flow; I'm just not there yet.

So some guy came in and proposed an entire rewrite of my featured article and for the first time I thought, you know, I think I'm done here. Maybe I'd be more product-ive elsewhere. I thought all of that, and wrote up this departing essay in favor of processes, and as I was writing the words "I think I'm done here," I realized... that's the product. How narcissistic of me to have not considered that there'd be anything after. Has an ant colony ever been about just one ant?