Facebook Companion

I was aware, even before I started reading, that a (paper) book about Facebook was at best a foolish enterprise, for the reader and the writer. The site evolves so quickly that anything said in the morning may have changed in the afternoon. Well, maybe not quite that fast, but rather quickly. All the same, it's worthwhile as a consideration, in spite of the fact that such a book covers one site at one moment in time, in that the superficial details change, but the core features likely will not.

I've likely meditated, or at least commented upon, the fact that social media is nothing new. The practice of establishing an identity and communicating with others online goes back to the earliest days of the Internet - and even a decade earlier, as bulletin board systems in the 1980's had many of the same features and functions. And even at that, the way in which people use computers to interact is a wan reflection of the way people interact in "real life."

That is to say that social media has not given us any way of communicating with one another that we did not already have, even from the era of tribalism. It has facilitated, consolidated, and coordinated the things that people were already doing - but ultimately, it has not invented any new modes or methods.

That's not to discount its value, as it encourages communication by removing the barriers (cost and incentive) inherent in previous methods, merely to state that it does not build upon them. Technology doesn't give users the ability to do anything they could not do before, but it adds convenience that makes it more likely they will actually do them.

And there, I think, is the value of technology, and a solid method for separating the value from the hype in deciding what features to develop or leverage. Where technology offers a capability for doing something that you are already doing, it is likely useful and valuable. Where it offers a completely new capability for something that you have never done, chances are you're not going to start doing it.

And while I won't discount the possibility something useful has been overlooked, my sense is that the current incarnation of Facebook has evolved to the point that most of the ways that people wish to interact with one another are covered. The essential features have probably been baked out for a long time, and a number of inessential ones have been tried out and abandoned or pushed to the background: such that if there's something you cannot do on Facebook today, likely it's not something many people would want to do at all.