We now have a Facebook group for Cosmic Variance! But let me work up to it.
I had heard about Facebook many times, but had effortlessly resisted the temptation to learn anything about it or get involved in any way. It’s a social-networking site, allowing people to keep each other up to date with stuff they are doing. A pastime in which I pretty much have no interest, despite what one might gather from the fact that I have a blog and all that. While I’ll tell stories about travel or amusing anecdotes for purposes of local color, and mention the occasional big event, for the most part I prefer to use the blog to talk about ideas and keep the fascinating details of my everyday life a tightly-shrouded mystery.
But at some point, the “everyone is doing it, how hard can it be, and maybe it could even be fun” argument kicks in, and in a moment of weakness you sign up. I blame Carl Zimmer, who just joined himself, with the usual disclaimers. It’s free, and easy as pie — you sign up, post a photo if you like, and that’s it.
The basic point of Facebook, according to my limited understanding, is to have “Friends.” That is, a set of other Facebookers with whom you have (mutually) agreed to allow access to your profile and information. There is a quite brilliant application via which, if you choose to allow it, Facebook can zip through a conventional email program (Gmail, apple, etc) looking for email addresses of other people with Facebook accounts, and let you ask them to be friends. And then there are networks of common interest and all that stuff. The obvious use is that you can simply tell Facebook when you’ve decided to quit your job and hike across the Andes, rather than emailing all of your friends individually.
But there is a deep problem of postmodern community ethics here — who is a “Friend,” in the official Facebook sense? One group would be, you know, your actual friends. Another would be people with whom you have some less tangible, but nevertheless pretty mutual and well-defined, relationship — maybe you’ve exchanged emails, or comments on each others blogs. It’s all up to you where to draw the line.
But personally, I wouldn’t count someone as a “Friend” if I had simply read their book, or visited their blog, or listened to their radio show, without them knowing me at all. And vice-versa. I mean, I think — to be honest, I’m new at this, and have no idea what the standards are. It might be very natural, for example, for regular CV readers to want to be my friend, but I’m not really sure it fits my notion of what friendship is really all about.
Then I noticed that Crooked Timber has its own Facebook group. Which seemed, at first, like the dumbest thing in the world — why do you need some proprietary social network when you already have the damn blog?
Upon digging deeper, however, I realized it was actually the smartest thing in the world. (A very fine line.) With the Facebook group, people can come together and share pictures, or relevant stories or rants, without being “friends” and dealing with constant updates about what they all had for dinner last night. (Although advancing to friendship — or more! — is always possible.) And in fact there are lots of blogs that have their own Facebook group.
So, now, so do we. Go ahead and join up. Upload your photo (or not). Share videos and pictures from the regular “Fans of CV” get-togethers which I’m sure happen all the time. The Pharyngula group has over a hundred members — you don’t want to be shown up by a bunch of godless cephalophiles, do you?
But there’s no way I’m ever having a MySpace page.
Update: Seems to be working! Over a hundred members, and the irrepressible Mark Jackson has even started a conversation about physics-related movie titles.
Haha, very nice :-D.
Regarding “friends,” opinions vary widely. I personally only friend people that I actually want to keep in touch with and am real-life friends with. Sometimes, after an event, I’ll accept friend requests from interesting people that I briefly interacted with, in the hope that I’ll keep in touch with them through Facebook and it’ll be worthwhile. More often than not, though, I end up not interacting with them any more at all, then eventually just removing them. (It’s good to know that Facebook doesn’t tell someone if you’ve removed them as your friend—although they can figure it out once they no longer have access to your profile.)
I seem far from typical in this, though. Most people just friend everyone they want to keep slightly connected to.
I think it’s also possible to keep separate lists of “these are the people I’ve ever interacted with” and “these are the people I’m willing to let know anyhing about me.” Supposedly, Facebook is actually a graph theory experiment grown out of hand.
That’s just like daring someone to make one for you…
We have 46 members already! Don’t be the only one sitting on the outside, with your nose pressed forlornly against the window.
Domenic makes a pretty decent point about friends. However, having started this group, Sean, I hope you realize that you’re going to be regarded as something of a minor celebrity and might get a correspondingly greater number of friend requests. For example, it’s not uncommon for athletes at D-1 schools to have hundreds and even thousands of “friends” on Facebook. Anyway, exciting stuff; keep up the blogging!
As for the facebook friend thing, I don’t think it has much to do with the notion of real-life friends at all. All it means is that your “friends” on facebook can see the pictures, etc that you post. As long as you have nothing on your page to hide, why not accept someone as your friend? Trust me, it does not obligate you to send them birthday cards.
Do note that your Facebook info is also commercially data-mined and sold to marketing
database firms. See
http://news.com.com/At+Rapleaf%2C+your+personals+are+public/2100-1038_3-6205716.html
for details.
— Jonathan Thornburg
With social networking software, “friend” is just a soft and fuzzy word for “contact.”
Some of your contacts might be friends/acquaintences as well, but really, it’s just your own contact database. With pictures. And zombies. And scrabulous.
Awesome. I am finally a bonafide expert on something posted to CV.
Sean, are you trying to compete with the facebook group I created? 🙂
Thanks for joining by the way. Indeed, facebook is the future. At first it was undergrads, then grad students, and now I’m discovering that even faculty are catching up with the times 🙂
As your meme-infecter, please accept my apologies. I’m finding that the definition of friends that works for me on Facebook is anybody who bothers to get in touch. As a writer, I sometimes get nice emails from readers. Facebook consolidates that network in place, along with people I’ve gotten to know through interviews as well as honest-to-goodness friends. I also get not-so-nice emails, but none of them has tried to add me to their friends lists.
Does it sound geeky for me to be thinking about creating a facebook account only because CV did? hmmm
For your next experiment, Sean, may I recommend LinkedIn for work-related connections? Linked In is kind of a glorified and linked-to-everything resume. It was the way that an ESA headhunter found me two years ago for a a job; I was impressed that he found me with only typing two words: “dust” and “Italy” (seriously). My consultant computer friends depend on it, and it looks like it’s reached some kind of critical mass, because people I would not have expected to know about it, are asking me about it. I’m encouraging the graduate students and postdocs around me to put their CVs there too, to gain them some visibility and connect to others who are doing work similar to theirs. And for personal reasons, I’m now trying to link up all of the people I care about, to make it easy to keep in touch and follow their movements (I’m making a big move myself soon).
Sorry, I need to wake up first: the link above is: LinkedIn.
I noticed on my face book page that a lot of my friends (20 total) have only one friend – that is so sad ?
Erik: It’s surprisingly easy to accumulate a large number of ‘friends’ on facebook who you are actually friends with, particularly if you are from a generation where a lot of people use it.
I currently have 107 friends listed, and all but 1 are actually friends. The reason for the large number is that quite often friends with whom you’d lost touch (school friends, university friends etc.) get back in contact by finding you on facebook.
I do find it a little odd to friend someone with whom you’ve had no contact. I have made one exception though, for a guy who shares my last name and explained that he was trying to befriend all the Fitzsimons on facebook. Seemed reasonable…
Amara, you’re not the only one who has recommended LinkedIn. It seems a bit more serious, for people who want business contacts rather than just to keep in touch.
I’m still a tiny bit reluctant to classify “anyone who has heard of me” as a “friend,” even in the Facebook sense. But heck, I was born before we landed on the Moon, so I might be out of step here.
Here’s my favorite post on types of Facebook friends:
http://inquestoftherobot.blogspot.com/2007/06/and-there-go-all-my-friends-revoking-my.html
I have an orkut presence, and I was using it for social reasons (not much time lately, though). For those who have tried both, what is the difference between orkut and facebook?
Sean – Like you, I was a social network holdout. But Facebook’s willingness to open up their api so outside developers can build applications is what sold me. In that way, my page can be a one-stop shop for all things me. My (occasional) blogging, my delicious bookmarks, my twitter feed, etc. can all appear on my profile. That way, my Facebook page can always be updating without me ever logging on. That, as Martha would say, is a good thing.
As for “who’s a friend”, that brilliant little gmail trick told me that my landlord has a facebook page – prompting the question is he to be marked friend or foe? Which in turn led me to the idea that will surely make me a million dollars: an anti social networking site where you list your enemies, rivals, and nemeses.
And finally, LinkedIn is pretty great – but unlike Amara, I’ve had no job offers…. yet.
Much of what I’ve heard here sounds like orkut. A friend told me that Google will integrate all that they have done for ‘socialstream’ (which I never heard of), and the orkut interface already has a different look, so my guess is they will compete directly with facebook very soon. But maybe it is too late and facebook has the momentum?
I’m with bswift. That robot-hunter gave a pretty solid list of “facebook friend” categories, if a bit on the negative side.
“Reject” is such a harsh word. I wonder if the designers chose it to encourage interconnection…nah, it’s probably just a convenient antonym to “accept.”
*sigh*
For the old fogies who are just jumping on the bandwagon and too lazy to ask their students, the point of Facebook and Facebook friends isn’t as much who counts your official definition of “friend” as much as it’s a good way to find information about someone rather quickly. Need a cell phone number, or wonder if that cute guy in class is in a relationship, or a myriad of other things? You check out their profile. Granted, unless you’re stupid this means you make sure your pictures don’t show you engaging in underage drinking, but hey this is the Internet.
I will, by the way, encourage any university professors here to not search their name to see if a Facebook group has been set up about them, particularly in their university network. Chances are there is one, perhaps with a name like “[instructor] is a spherical cow” “@#$@$-face [instructor]”, so you might be better to steer clear of that.
Oh, and Facebook also means poking. How come no one else has mentioned poking yet?
Facebook is kind of fun.
They are terrified of being cluttered up with spam, and so put restrictions on things (watch out — if your group is more than 500 people, you will not be able to send “updates” to group members en masse.) They are really trying to figure out what they are doing, but they are being smart to a certain extent and avoiding some of the problems of the “first generation” of social network sites.
I admit I friended Peter Segal when I saw his name. He is so cool! I am also friends with Harold Bloom (although the profile is actually set up by bored Cambridge students.) These are things that push the system, and they make facebook nervous (ideally, if I were a Peter Segal fan, I would join the “mellifluous tones of Peter Segal” group.) Orkut was much more draconian about things (e.g., if your picture was not you, you were deleted), they kind of overreacted to the myspace phenom.
danah boyd, guru of these things has an article on class and facebook: http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html (she is also mad at facebook because of the 500 people restriction I mention above — partly because it’s secret.)
There is nothing like the real world.
Claire
Facebook sounds nice, unfortunately I can´t join because I´m from Finland and when I tried to registrate they didn´t accept the name of my school. Which wasn´t very surprising, but anyway I wasn´t able to registrate…