Facebook

Facebook growth rate — doubling in size in just eight months — suggests Facebook is rapidly becoming the Web’s dominant social ecosystem and an essential personal and business networking tool in much of the wired world.

On Facebook, there's a new way you communicate - through the stream. Every time you log into your home page you see a running timeline or stream of the information being shared by your friends and the other things you're connected with. The more people share, the more you see in the stream and the more you learn about your connections. This stream doesn't have a reciprocal /direct way of communication. When you interact with a story in the stream, commenting on a piece of conntent you liked, the person sharing it becomes part of your active network.

Facebook management is acting like a group of cult leaders intent on changing the rest of us into more social, less private people than we might want to be ... Isn't there a lot more to human connection than one liner status updates, photos posted online, "thumbs up" and the other relatively mechanistic interactions that people have on Facebook? What's the end result of all these magical connections through relatively shallow communication? Advertising! ... That's the highlight of all this - formerly free-thinking individuals [using] Facebook to turn themselves into players in an advertisement.

One important question is whether we will have a much more radically distributed capacity to create knowledge, information and culture, and participate in the creation of knowledge, information and culture, or whether we will have a replicated and only slightly different industrial structure to information and knowledge production. We are now in a much more permeable and fluid society and a much more permeable cultural environment where the difference between producers and consumers is much more blurred.

Human beings are also undergoing transmutations into electronic avatars on the realtime social network; therefore the ability to automatically track and analyze their "movements" and "relationships" becomes an increasingly attractive value-mining opportunity. This opportunity exists today, but what's required to exploit it is the connection of the rich data collected on avatars' activities with data collected on various salient economic variables. Such a connection of datasets would allow much more precise estimates of the economic value of, for example, "friends" and "followers" in the context of both consumer markets and labor markets and, in turn, the ability to better measure, incentivize, and in general manipulate interactions on the so-called social graph.

But the mayor treat these kind of social network present is preventing human beings from becoming fully developed: A computer is a logical machine; our human brain has both a logical and a creative and/or emotional side. If we unduly stimulate the logical side and deprive the creative-emotional side (or the converse) the deprived functions atrophy. That influences our personality. We should try not to become a binary person; otherwise we will loose some of the valuable resources we have (like the ability to write a poem), our social skills will deteriorate and probably our human friends will vanish.