A Sure Sign Facebook Is, In Fact, Taking Over the Whole World, and How You Can Too

I have been putting off joining Facebook. What a Luddite I am! Like everyone else, I've been, over the past several months, getting slowly buried in Facebook invitations from friends and acquaintances who've "gone over." But I already have a dozen Internet homes. I already have a multitude of connections with my people, in a range of communication channels. I haven't felt the need to add another. Today, finally, the last straw arrived.

I received a Facebook invitation from my father.

OK, OK. I'm signing up. Resistance--clearly!--is futile. Not that my dad is technophobic. It's just that, I'll say, he's not an early adopter.

As I went through the signup process, I have to say I was pretty impressed with the add email contacts feature, and I think it probably explains how it came to pass that I got an invite from my father. When you join Facebook, it asks you for your email addresses and passwords, and it logs in to your accounts, scanning your contacts to see who's already using Facebook. It offers you options to "friend" (the best new verb, by the way, since "google") existing Facebook users and invite the rest to join.

The beauty of this approach is that it taps into the existing networks of relationships we formalize in our online address books. By adding a person to our contacts, we effectively say "I know this person." And what a great service, for Facebook to "hear" that declaration and make it importable. We're saved having to manually add contacts, and Facebook takes over the world, spreading itself like a salty joke across the Web's relational architecture.

I can imagine a couple other opportunities to use the same kind of mechanism. What about, for example, our instant messaging contacts? What about the blogs we subscribe to? What about the lists of permitted visitors to our YouTube channels and our Flickr photostreams? Our contacts on social media sites? What about other members of our online communities?

Facebook's contact finder thingie is a great example of a mutually-beneficial service built on an architecture that transcends domain. The network of human relations crosses boundaries of web site ownership, Web service, and platform, but it is, nonetheless, machine-readable.

The Internet is rich with relational architectures. Too rich, in a way--if you were to envision relationship "services" that tapped into all our established contacts and relationships, across all our online identities, the need for some kind of automated classification of contacts becomes pretty clear pretty fast. There's a reason we group contacts, a reason we have different contacts in different places.

Some day I'll blog about a typology of online relationships. Maybe there's a good one out there already--please let me know!

It all makes me wonder: Do you think the old man has my RSS feed? Scary.

Comments

[Phil Barrett]

As scary as it was to get an invite from your father, just wait until he sends you an invite to join vampirefreaks.com! ha!

You raise some good points - specifically around leveraging your other online assets into facebook. There are a few ways this can happen... the walled garden at facebook could come down. there are signs of this with google now picking up your profile.

The other idea that is floating around is "identity 2.0" - or a universal avatar that you can bring with you to any social networking or web 2.0 site. Instead of creating multiple profiles and managing them, why not have one that you can access anytime on the web - kind of like a driver's license for the web.

I've blogged about this topic on my site in more detail if you are interested in continuning the discussion!

http://www.burningthebacon.com

[tyesha]

When I've used this functionality on Yelp, Dodgeball and a few others I've had the experience of realizing communities i didn't even know I was part of. Gmail stores every email address you write to so when a site looks through your address book to see who is already on the site I've discovered that people i wouldn't have even thought of connecting with on the site where already members. Instant hidden community! Kinda cool. It's like my email is remembering people for me and the website is reminding me or informing me that we have something in common.

[Tim Beadle]

You're after Portable Social Networks :)
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=portable+social+networks

Jeremy Keith's been blogging about it quite a lot:
http://adactio.com/journal/1212/

[Ryan]

Yes Tim, I love the idea of portable social networks, and I love Tyesha's comment about the "instant hidden community." To me, this stuff is the real Web, a secret structure only partially exposed on web sites--and the idea of social architecture as a practice is to enable and extend that structure.

To me, the "portable" social network always did stretch across domains--web sites just didn't support them, and the "instant" hidden communities were always there.

But now I'm ranting. :)

Thanks for the thoughtful comments, and Tim thanks for the pointer to Jeremy's blog. I'll check it out.