aaron c beals

two posts in a week… what in the world is happening here?!?

(well, the deal is that i got around to linking to the “post” page from my blackberry, meaning that i can post from pretty much anywhere i get cell reception. however, i can’t promise this streak will continue indefinitely…)

this past thanksgiving, my younger cousins convinced me to join Facebook, something i had avoided for several reasons:

1) it started after i left college, and at first was limited to college students, so joining would have required some sort of email trickery.

2) i mentally grouped it with MySpace, that blight on the face of the web that managed to single-handedly resuscitate 1994-era monolithic webpages complete with blinking text, poorly laid-out pictures, and blaring music that starts upon page visit.

3) i didn’t see the benefit in social networking outside of my current utilities: my website, email, and instant messaging. i was using (and still use) LinkedIn, but that is more of a professional social networking tool rather than a personal one. i figured that i was connected enough.

what i didn’t realize at the time was that Facebook was built properly, with an eye to privacy and scalability, and seemed to be designed with simplicity in mind. luckily, my cousins managed to convince me, and i joined.

what i also didn’t pick up on at the time was that while i was freely sharing information about myself via my website, very few of my friends were doing the same. i could get information from those who had sites or blogs, but most of the rest didn’t have the time/money/patience/interest in something as heavy-duty as a website.

enter Facebook. it reduces the problems of website management and provides simple input for information from status updates to photos to contact information. my friends who didn’t have the incentive to run a website suddenly had little excuse not to sign up … and with all of them on there and updating, i instantly had a single source of information about what my friends are up to.

i’m not going to keep singing the praises of Facebook — like any time-consuming activity it does have its downsides — but will instead leave that to fanatics like Scoble. (90% of his posts in the past few weeks have referred to Facebook in some way, shape, or form.)

so i’m fine with taking some of the information i’d usually put on my blog (longer process, more thought-out content) and instead post bite-size pieces on Facebook. however, there are now ways of posting information on a more-constant basis. imagine a text-message-sized chunk of information about what you’re up to, updated several to many times per hour, and available for all your friends to see.

this approach has been called (appropriately, i think) micro-blogging, and there are no shortage of tools for sharing the minutia of your life with those who care to listen: Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, and Tumblr are the main ones. the distribution methods for micro-blogs are slightly different than blogs and social networking (which rely on site visits and RSS feeds). the information in micro-blogs is text-message sized, which means that you can sign up to have all info piped into your cell phone.

faaaaaantastic. how are we actually supposed to get anything accomplished if our time is sucked up writing about what we’re doing and where we are at any given moment and reading the same from hundreds of our friends? can you imagine how rapidly this would break down? (“reading the news”…”driving the car”…”working”….”surfing the web at work”…”reading Twitter messages”…”writing this message”…”reading messages”…”writing”…”reading”…”writing”) it’s like hooking straight up to someone’s mind, but without any sort of filter. frankly, i think it would be mind-numbing.

in my opinion, the line between Facebook and Twitter is the line between sharing and over-sharing. (but who knows… i once said that Facebook was a total waste of time. in a year, i might be posting about how i couldn’t imagine life without micro-blogging.)