Everyone Is On Facebook

Of late, my Hotmail has been clogged with email from one source - Facebook. Each day 60-90% of the personal email I receive is from this social networking phenom of a website. You gotta hand it to them - they have come up with the next big thing after Friendster. They allow people to do fundamentally simple things we like to do with our friends like make comments, ask questions and post pictures. But here's the icing on the cake - Facebook lets you know when your friends respond, add friends, add applications, send virtual beer, join causes or superpoke someone - stuff, at the onset, that sounds like crap and not worth two hoots. But the prompt telling me that my contact person A is associating with stranger B makes me think a little deeper, provoking the urge to kaypoh. This urge is what builds the interconnectedness. Six degrees into millions of nodes and links between people. It's huge, baby. Imagine the stats alone. Tasty data.

The other interesting that happens is a matter of social science and psychology. Ponder on this - We join groups on Facebook, networks of mutual interest. Invitations by administrators are sent to those they see fit joining this clique. This leads to questions about basis of invites, agendas and why some people an invitee may assume as fellow groupies are left out. It's just like teenagers in high school who want to be cool. What happens when someone quits a group? Simple dislike, ennui or something deeper?

There's also the anti-Facebook vibe surfacing among many who are tired of all the information and interconnectedness. "Leave me alone, I know who my friends are already!", they cry. I have met folks in the office who have expressed this sentiment. There are others who have asked "What is going on in Facebook? I get 2 milions emails and I am poked, prodded and bitten every other hour. What have I got into?".

Someone is probably doing a thesis on virtual social networks right now. And someone other guy is probably calculating the amount of approved spam Facebook is sending out each second.