Social Life of Information

I appear to be an early adopter of some social networks and not others; I set up a Facebook account just last week. After considering it useless to me for two years as a student, I find it considerably more useful as an alumna. In terms of keeping up with college pals, there’s no easier way than using these handy social media sites, even if I can come up with a lengthy list of complaints about their interfaces and interaction paradigms.

Since I graduated from undergrad seven years ago, my Alma classmates were a “lost cause” in terms of tracking them down on the web, and in fact, I’ve only located a small handful of them. My Michigan classmates from SI are another story entirely; many of us are so thoroughly intertwingled on the Internet that we know much more about each other in the virtual realm than we ever would have as dorm mates. Add to that a handful of friends from student volunteering at CHI conferences in the last two years, and I had just over a hundred friends in two days. Like 80% (or so) of MSU students in Cliff Lampe’s research on Facebook, I know all of these people “in real life” or I wouldn’t have added them as friends.

There are a couple of things that I really like about Facebook, and quite a few others that really irritate me. The highlights include being able to import blog posts as notes, and being able to plug in Twitter, Flickr, and del.icio.us apps so that I can aggregate some of my varied microblog content in one place. I would really prefer to have my Twitter stream replace my Facebook status updates; the bottom line is that I will make text-type status updates in one place only, and I’m already locked in to Twitter. I think that the Facebook interfaces and search utilities could use so much improvement that I won’t go into it here. The content labeling on Facebook really turns me off because it smacks of dumbing-down Internet social media. However, if that’s what it takes, perhaps web-enabled social media does need to be more automatic for the people. I don’t generally identify myself as a technology geek, but I’m certainly not the everyman when it comes to living online.