It’s just a Social Network

Some friends of the Dark Mistress referred to the disappearance of one of their midst form FaceBook as suicide, and her eventual return as resurrection.

This got the Dark Mistress thinking…

In the future nobody will visit a website for health or any other information – they will just get content feeds through FaceBook.

Nobody will keep a diary – they will just have a series of FaceBook Place Markers for significant time/space events dating back to birth.

Nobody will have a photo album – they will just upload images to FaceBook.

We will be more accepting of life’s indiscretions – because by the age of 20 everyone’s will have been caught and posted on FaceBook.

Advertising will only ever be an offer served by FaceBook to a mobile device that knows where you are and what you are interested in.

Tomorrow, FaceBook will announce a new service – most likely email, although it could be a text service. If it is email, will you ever bother opening your hotmail, bigpond, gmail or yahoo account again? If it is text, why would you pay text fees ever again?

Social networks (well – specifically FaceBook) have become the foundation of all things. Soon Rockmelt (a browser that combines Social Network features) will drill a hole in Google revenues, and Facebook will conquer the phone and email companies.

As the beast gets bigger the reasons for joining become more compelling. You can’t really create a social medium unless it is integrated with FaceBook. Although the fact that there are real concerns about accepting FaceBooks default privacy settings, the user experience is judged by the majority to be worth the risk. Privacy protests have been feeble, more users join every day, and even more on mobile.

So – what if the server went down?

What if that annoying little colour spinning wheel (for Apple users) spun indefinitely one day?

Is FaceBook actually a viable business? Nobody seems to know a definitive answer – although things looked pretty grim as recently as 2009.

And that brings me to another question – if ad revenues don’t pan out, would you give your credit card details to FaceBook?

Would you feel better about a fee-for-service model if you got free text?

Or, would you feel better about it if, as a user, you had a share in the company? (Or at least, that if wasn’t owned by a bunch of Harvard types portrayed in the recent Social Network movie).

The Dark Mistress loves the sleek usability of FaceBook, but she also loves taking a break from time to time. It is just a social medium. You can “ignore” it.

And what happens if you do? A few friends will ask, one or two will actually phone you. And your consciousness will change.

FaceBook is the master of the 1 second grab. With FaceBook, your consciousness is exposed to hundreds of extra thoughts per day – mostly generated by others. Time away from it is more-often-than-not, time spent with your own agenda.

Oh – back to the study of embodied life…
Weight-loss goals: Managed to walk twice and laze under a fig tree once – surely a top score weekend.
Fitness goals: Well… not quite, although am wondering how 2 hours of shopping would show on a pedometer.
Stress-relief: Two walks, one fig tree – can’t get better than that.

Yours,

The Dark Mistress
The Balance Blog – A reflection on virtual life versus embodied life; ostensibly finding sunshine, holistic fitness, natural weight-loss and stress relief for an obsessed workaholic screen addict, with the occasional dig at the World Wide Web.