hating facebook..

Ok the title of the post is a little misguiding, but its kinda close to what i feel about it. After all that has been said about facebook..good and bad.. it remains popular and growing like hell. Its not so hard to believe but people are almost building up a new culture inside. Yes, everyone there is different, but the culture of sharing every moment, every small and sometimes personal detail to all, may seem a little odd. Although this cannot be judged as good or bad, but its a good idea to stop and think about it for a while.

Another thing to wonder is how did they manage to make everybody give their real name and photograph. From an outsider perspective, this may seem like a coincidence, but is it? I am not an expert here but it could be because of the way it started, by making real friends who knew you, or it could be because of some algorithmic bias embedded in the total facebook ecosystem.(or a combination of both). Lets look at the later. Somewhere i read, the site actually 'prefers' people with photos in their search results. This small bias may directly lead to either total rejection or adaption into the new format. So as the number of people build up and time goes by, the total ecosystem will move towards this new format, a real name space and real picture, in this case. This in turn could lead to a number of things one of them being trust. Now a sprinkle of trust here and there would turn the most not-so-social person into a fairly social person and this can cascade. 

Another interesting thing, that i donot really understand is why build a smaller internet inside internet? (Completely understand the point of view of mark, but looking at the 'big' picture). Now there are pages for buying stuff, playing stuff..etc only that its built upside down.. social 1st. This question can be easily answered though, its just the matter of growth of market and arrival of more social options. In this case, Google gets a thumbs up for slowly making all their major products social and integrated. The best part is giving more freedom to the user and let the ecosystem develop on its own, rather than try and engineer it by adding biases under the hood.