October 3, 2008
Ah, Facebook gets a mention in my new favourite, Peep Show, when Mark makes a deal with an Australian to have her pretend she’s his girlfriend in exchange for letting her stay with him:
Mark: So, I could tell people you were my girlfriend?
Saz: Well, we might… take things slow, to start with, yeah?
Mark: Sure, but we could still have fun, and y’know, watch Morse, and people could see us out together, like at my birthday party on Friday. And I could put a photo of us on Facebook?
Saz: …Sure… All that stuff.
[Episode 3, Season 5]
So there you go, if you weren’t already convinced that Facebook is now just a normal part of everyday life in places like London and Toronto (and that the performativity and rituals of of dating now include Facebook photos).
Tags: peep show, academic, facebook, thesis
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September 29, 2008
One fascinating thing about Facebook is how much it has changed since it was first launched in 2004. Like the other early social networking sites such as Friendster, Facebook started out with very simple features (check out their early FAQ to see what I mean). But, unlike Friendster and a lot of other sites,* Facebook kept adding features that not only drastically changed how the site works, but increasingly made it insanely addictive. In writing my first chapter for my thesis which summarizes the history of Facebook’s development, I’m realising how important these changes are in understanding not only the culture of Facebook today (especially in Toronto, where many people adopted it earlier there then elsewhere, and thus were witness to a lot of the changes), but also in understanding the state and meaning of social networking sites more broadly.
As I mentioned, early Facebook was like any other social networking site, except that it was aimed at the niche market of university students. It was the functionality of these sites that gave rise to the term online social networking - you add your friends and in essence make tangible your offline social network. (Something I’m investigating is the development of that term - did the sites actually ever use it themselves, or did the academics/bloggers come up with it?) Anyway, on Friendster back in the day (2003) I remember my friends and I all got excited and spent hours adding everyone we knew. Then we had added everyone, and got bored, and thought “now what?” There was really nothing to do with that meticulously created list of friends. So we all forgot about it. But Facebook went beyond that, and gave us something to do with that list. They’ve made that list your audience, your contact list, your source of information and your entertainment. I think its fair to say that Facebook has gone beyond what we first called a social networking site.
danah boyd and Nicole Ellison recently proposed that the term should be social network, rather than social networking sites because the latter implies that active searching for and engagement with new people. Facebook and other sites aren’t really about meeting new people, they’re about growing and maintaining existing relationships with people we already know. As we all know, adding someone you don’t know on Facebook has become a total faux pas. For them, the primary characteristic of social network sites, or whatever you want to call them, is that they allow you to create and show your social network. But I think that’s only the beginning of what Facebook is today. That social network is definitely the foundation for all of the other activities on the site, but I don’t think that it’s still the defining characteristic.
I think the best way to understand how Facebook has gone beyond being just a social networking site is to see how it has evolved from what we meant by social networking site in 2004. Facebook’s three big axes of change can be summarized in terms of access, audience and information the first two of which are closely intertwined. The first Facebook, which was actually officially called thefacebook at the time (pictured courtesy archive.org) was essentially just your profile and a list of your friends, like all good social networks of the time (and still some today).
Access-wise, early Facebook was closed - you needed a valid email address from an approved school to join, which was just Harvard at first. The audience was students exclusively, and had features specifically for that purpose, such as being able to see who was in your classes. Or helping you get laid, as Karel Baloun, one of the first Facebook engineers, suggests in his book on the subject: “Facebook gives users what they want, which for college students is information about their friends and schoolmates for the purpose of… well … sex. And fun social events, which lead to sex” (Inside Facebook, p 91). And lastly, the information on thefacebook was ephemeral. You could change stuff on your profile, and no one would know unless they went looking and could remember what you had there before. As danah boyd puts it, there was security in obscurity. Closed doors, ephemeral information and a student-only audience made people feel safe sharing their real and personal details about themselves. If only other students will see, and only those I want, it’s okay for me to post my dorm room and mobile number on Facebook. In fact, people felt encouraged to do so. There was a pay off - it made socializing easier. People will give up their privacy if they get something in exchange, like free air travel (Air Miles cards) or convenience (putting your thumb and iris on file to cross the border faster, as with the Nexxus card in North America). It was this closed, student only phase in Facebook’s history that created Facebook’s continuing culture of sharing lots of accurate personal information that gives Facebook its tremendous value. I suspect things would not be the same if Facebook had opened up to everyone right away, since it was still unusual to so closely tie one’s offline life and identity with their online one.
Anyway, as we all know, Facebook opened it’s doors to everyone. Slowly at first, with high school kids first being allowed on (September 2005). Then select companies, such as Apple and Microsoft (May 2006), then everyone (September 2006).** This fateful day in September was also the day that Facebook added the News and Mini-Feeds. It was a double whammy. No longer could you feel projected from the rest of the world by Facebook’s walls of valid-email-requirements and that feel relatively assured that those drunken party photos from last night’s kegger would probably not grace the eyes of your boss.*** In fact, now, your boss would probably get notified that the pictures were posted, via her shiny new News Feed. All at once, everything was different.
First, the information on Facebook that had once been ephemeral was now not only artifactual, but was also being actively pushed to your friends. The formerly invisible act of updating your profile was now visible. Activities change when we know people are watching. They become performative. Now, not only was your profile performative, but the act of maintaining it was also a performance. The addition of feeds made it possible to watch snippets of our friends lives, without having to interact with them or even having them know we watching. It’s the replacement of reciprocal interaction with information flows. The recent redesign has reinforced this informational shift. The default thing you see when you view someone’s profile is no longer their personal and contact information, but the activity from their wall and mini-feeds combined. In fact, you could probably say this is an emerging axis of change on Facebook that is strongly related to the informational shift - a shift in focus from personal information to a focus on one’s activity and interactions with others.
Secondly, Facebook had moved from being closed to open access, and in so doing had changed from catering to students to catering to everyone. This change in audience not only meant changes in Facebook’s affordances to make it more appealing to a mainstream audience (for example, getting rid of the courses feature), but a change in every users’ potential audience. Now all the early adopters had to rethink if that profile they had created when Facebook was students-only was appropriate for everyone in their lives to potentially see.
I had a bit of an interesting experience with this shift in audience. I had been on Facebook since 2004, but didn’t really use it in the university context since I had already graduated earlier that year. I did, however, use it primarily with people from my personal rather than professional life. But, when Facebook took off in Toronto in late 2006 (pictured in action on the right), I was working at a place that blended the personal and the professional, as I think a lot of young high tech firms do these days. Anyway, it took me a while after Facebook opened up to everyone to realise that my vague feeling of discomfort when using Facebook stemmed from the fact that Facebook had essentially mashed up all my contexts into one big context, yet out of habit, I was still using and thinking about the site as if I was just interacting with close friends in terms of sharing more and different things that I probably would’ve otherwise. From talking to other people about this, I think this experience is common for a lot of early adopters, but I think it may have been even more subtle for me given the culture of where I was working at the time.
So what is Facebook now? I’m still working on it, but it’s more than a social networking site since creating and articulating our networks is definitely only the foundation of what we’re actually doing on Facebook these days. The front page of Facebook (the one you see when you’re logged out) says it’s a “social utility” that can be used to “keep up with friends and family; share photos and videos; control privacy online; and reconnect with old classmates.” But overall, it “connects you with the people around you.” Baloun (remember that Facebook engineer?) says that “everything social can be transacted inside [Facebook]” (Inside Facebook, p 71). While not yet a reality, it’s certainly Zuckerberg’s fantasy of how he wants Facebook to be, and says a lot about what I think is an inherent believe at Facebook: that everything can be reduced to 1s and 0s. Today, Facebook is social networking, but its also life streaming, photo sharing, video sharing, blogging, event organizing and a bunch of other stuff we haven’t got proper names for yet. But take that thought and add this: some would say that like MySpace, Facebook is “the next generation of marketing, advertising and promotion, exquisitely disguised as social networking.” A little scary, no?
—
* Even my favorite, LiveJournal, has remained basically the same since 1999, but it looks like that might be changing since SUP bought them. I haven’t decided if this is good or bad yet, but Facebook has shown that even relatively minor-ish changes like Feeds can change the whole culture, meaning and use of a site.
** Of course, it is important to point out that a lot of the safety in Facebook’s student-only access was psychological. Stuff still leaked out, and school admins and other unwelcome people still got in. But the power of that sort of belief, and the culture of accurate personal information sharing that came from it, cannot be ignored. However, when Facebook opens its doors, the reality of the situation hits you right in the face. Its not easy to go on believing that what you put on Facebook will stay there.
*** Note that both the opening to high school kids and everyone were in September, the start of the school year in North America.
Tags: facebook history, academic, facebook, thesis
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September 11, 2008
I’ve started writing the first chapter of my thesis (if you can believe it, because I can’t!). It’s basically all you ever wanted to know about Facebook’s history (especially with respect to its use in Toronto), features and business end. And I’m calling it “Opening Facebook” (har har).
Anyway, I was digging through my old emails to try and figure out when the University of Toronto network was added to Facebook (as far as I can tell, it was late November 2004, according to good old Archive.org), as well as when I first joined and found this:
From: “thefacebook.com” <confirm@thefacebook.com>
Date: 20 December 2004 9:40:32 AM
To: raynes.goldie@*******
Subject: elvedin t******* has listed you as a friend…
Elvedin T******* has requested to add you as a friend, but before we can
do that, you must confirm that you are in fact friends with Elvedin.
To confirm this request, go to:
http://utoronto.thefacebook.com/confirminvite.php
Thanks,
thefacebook team.
The funny thing is, I’ve never actually met the guy. In fact, in the beginning almost all my Facebook friends were people I only knew from other sites, like LiveJournal. Did that happen to anyone else? It’s almost like we all hadn’t worked out how we were “supposed” to use it yet, and we were still in that phase where we could be somewhat anonymous online, with identities that were unconnected and undetermined by our “real” lives.
Also funny that it used to be called thefacebook, especially since now they seem to have a strong aversion to the word. At SXSW this year all the devs at the developer garage talked about “Platform,” and all descriptions of features on the Facebook blog talk about “Feed” or “Mini-Feed.” Weird. And kinda cult like.
Extra bonus: does anyone remember what used to be written at the bottom of Facebook? It said “a Mark Zuckerberg production” and “I’ll find something to put here” but I also remember something about guns… Anyone?
Tags: thefacebook, academic, facebook, thesis
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August 7, 2008
It has started. Last year it was all MySpace in Perth, but I’ve started overhearing conversations about Facebook on the street and seeing kids using it on the computers at school. Then this morning, while looking for info on their super gross breakfasts for a top secret project, I found out that Hungry Jack’s (the Australian name for Burger King) is advertising it’s Facebook page on its website.
It’s still not as crazy as Toronto, but my gut feeling is that it won’t ever be. The way people use the internet here and the way people socialize just isn’t as compatible with the Facebook way of doing things. I have to think about the specifics more, but I think it has a lot to do with using mobiles (Perth) over the internet on a desktop computer and having lots and of cheap internet access in every home (Toronto). And, as Alex Leitch brilliantly pointed out, Toronto is already divided up in a networky way - with a bunch of very distinct neighbourhood nodes linked together by an excellent transit system. Torontonians are already thinking in a Facebooky way.
Tags: academic, facebook, thesis, australia, perth
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July 8, 2008
an e-card from someecards. [thanks daniel reda and stef carmichael!]
Tags: sns, funny, academic, thesis
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May 22, 2008
The other day, I was biking up the Bathurst hill and I passed the Telus billboard advertising Facebook mobile on their phones for the upteenth time. Fun fact: Rogers was the first to advertise their Facebook mobile service, followed by Bell and Telus. 
The billboard reminded me of sign I saw on the window of the women’s clothing store Smart Set at the Eaton Centre earlier in the week. It had a Facebook logo and was advertising some new fashion cubes application, where you can compete with your friends about who has the best fashion, or something equally ridiculous. I was taken by the “Add Smart Set Fashion Cubes to your applications!” that was under the Facebook logo. I think that was the first time I’ve seen such technical language on the outside of a women’s clothing store. It’s still super gendered (compete with your friends to see who is the hottest), but really, is anyone surprised? I looked out for more Facebook logos as I walked through the mall, and not surprisingly there where two more at the Bell World and Rogers stores.
But that’s not all! At the end of April, I saw a presentation at CaseCamp about the success of TD Canada Trust’s Facebook app. That same night, Bryan Segal, VP at Comscore did a presentation about the insane popularity of social media in Canada. According to Comscore, Canada is the “most penetrated country” and “we view the most content and spend the most time interacting with social media.” In this context, its not really a surprise that Toronto is madly in love with Facebook.
So, this all got me thinking. A clothing store advertising it’s Facebook app, and a bank has one too? And there are so many extra Facebook shirts in Toronto that random bike riding junk collectors are wearing them? What I’m witnessing here in Toronto is so obvious that it’s invisible to me. It’s the first time a social web service, or anything from the internet really (besides when the web itself became big and we started seeing URLs all over the place… but that’s more a protocol and less a commercial service), has become so tightly integrated into so many aspects of mainstream life. For Torontonians, Facebook is becoming the mediator for so many everyday interactions, between people and between people and companies, and its being done at level of penetration we’ve never seen before.
Moar!
Rogers TV ad for Facebook mobile
My growing collection of photos of Facebook appearing in real life around Toronto
Tags: toronto, academic, facebook, thesis
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May 21, 2008
There was a rather ratty looking guy with crazy dirty hair carrying a desktop computer, three rods of something, a half exploded tv-like electronic device of some sort and two bags of miscellaneous parts, all while trying to ride a bike… and he was wearing a blue FACEBOOK SWEATSHIRT.
Tags: toronto, academic, facebook, thesis
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May 21, 2008
My ROFLCon documentary is airing this morning at 11:30 ET on CBC radio, and again Saturday at 4pm. It features Tron Guy, David Weinberger, Leslie Hall and Anil Dash. Yay!
It’s also up on the Spark blog for your on demand listening pleasure (skip to 17:51).
For my first ever time doing radio, I think it turned out pretty well! Nora Young was super nice and took the time to coach me through the voice stuff to make sure it sounded good. How lucky is that? She has a cult following for having such an amazing radio voice (well, that AND being brainy, obviously). Also a big thanks to Luke Walker for being my crew in Boston.
Tags: cbc, spark, roflcon, academic, thesis
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May 6, 2008
there’s this guy that i started talking to… well… he started talking to me, at bathurst station, and we talked all the way up to claxton on the #7 bus.
he isn’t on facebook (he told me) and when i tried to google stalk him, there were no results. except for this other guy with the same name who seems obsessed with parachutes.
i kinda love it. people adding you on facebook that you just met is like a commitment. i mean really, it turns the world into a small town. everyone is so easy to reach. they’re right there. i like the mystery and freedom of space and time.
i’m also so careful about what and who i write about on here now. not like the olden days when i was writing to the vast unknown expanse of THE INTERNET. but i know i can write this and he probably won’t read it (oh just watch him now! uhh hi;) ).
but it’s also weird because googling and facebooking is so habitual to me now. i need my backgroud info on people. and pictures. lots of pictures, like everyone gleefully puts up at facebook so we can all look at each other. i feel like that telepathic guy from heroes when he tries to listen to people’s thoughts when the haitian mind blocker dude is around. cuz yeah, my super power is without a doubt the internet, especially internet stalking >:]
(i’m tempted to start writing in all lowercase again. it’s so much prettier. and it just flooooows when i write this way)
Tags: stalking, friends, academic, facebook, thesis
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April 29, 2008
I’m back from ROFLCon (*tear*) with my computer full of interviews with internet celebs and thinkers, which I’m working on turning into a radio doc for CBC’s Spark. I’m just working out with the folks at Spark about what to do with all of the extra audio that doesn’t make the doc (there’s so much good stuff!), but until then, here’s the full video of me interviewing Tron Guy that Luke recorded.
You can also check out the guest blogging I did on the Spark blog. I posted my wrap up last night.
Tags: video, mit, jay maynard, tron guy, cbc, travel, roflcon, spark, boston, academic
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