Friendser started -- and Facebook mastered -- the perversion of the term "friend" from a trusted companion to someone who could fit into any category of loose acquaintance -- those we knew long ago, those we've only just met for the first time, perhaps even those we've never met but who are simply friends of friends (but are they really even that?).

Ths loose structure has made it easier to permeate social groups. I went to a high school with a large graduating class of several hundred students, and had an online dialogue with a classmate last year regarding whether someone who had started befreinding members of the class had actually attended the school as neither of us remembered him and almost certainly had not been friends with him. Of course, the more classmates he "friended", the more credibillity he gained with others as Facebook shows which mutual friends one soliciting friendship may have.

Now, Facebook has moved well beyond its site's borders with the increasingly ubiquitous "like" button, which connotes as casual a relationship as friending has come to represent. Indeed, "like' is somewhat of the conterpart of friending for things that can't neessarily necessarily you back. It moves Facebook from charting your social graph to your preference graph. With faux friendships, the main incentive to distorting your people relationships is peer pressure. Without that, marketers are now turning to incentives. Organizers of an event that I often attend recently offered me a T-shirt to "like" their Facebook page. Rovio offers those who "like" he Angry Birds Facebook page exclsive content.

What's to come of all this payola for sayola? If the medium itself is the victim, then it will lead to misharacerization of what people actually like. The more like-ly scenario, though, is that it will just lead to a dilution or new connotaiton of the verbnoun as it did for "friend."

I can make it worth your while if you're like-minded. In fact, I'll be your best "friend,"

 

Facebook has turned six years old and will, incredibly, pass the 400 million user mark this week. I use Facebook today far more than I ever thought I would. I log in to the site almost daily. It has increasingly taken the place of e-mail for many uses (at least for my contacts who are active on it) and it has bored its way into my cell phone address book, supplying relevant phone numbers and often inaccurate photos. And I could never want for things to do simply by attending the many public events to which I am blindly invited to on the site.

Facebook has opened my eyes to the idea that we, or at least the next generation of Internet users, may never (willingly) lose touch with people again. And its status updates have ushered in a new social phenomenon of passively staying in touch with people. I've often wondered about a day when attendees at a class reunion will simply sit around and have nothing to talk about because they're all up to date following each other on Facebook.

I am awed by the diversity of people that I am connected to on the site. They range from my closest family and friends to a few people who, honestly, I don't even know or at least can't remember. I befriended them because it seemed likely that they were, for example, former classmates based on our mutual friends. Indeed, at least a third of my grade school classmates are now Facebook friends, as are people I met in summer camps, junior high school, high school, and college. My Facebook friends include people I've worked with me at nearly every company, people who work at competitive companies, and people who never want to work for a company. They are engineers and artists; their birthdays span decades and their locations span continents. And there's no faster path to realizing "it's a small world" than finding out that two friends you know through different contexts are connected to each other some other way. This has happened to me for two sets of Facebook friends.

And the truth, I know, is that I've barely scratched the surface of what the site has to offer because I have been very reluctant to add Facebook applications. Clearly, Facebook has been a conduit to a wide range of entertainment and games for many of my friends. It can be an incredible time vortex.

And yet, for all this, I find Facebook to be, to steal a phrase from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, "mostly useless."

First, while Facebook connects me to an incredible community of individuals I've known throughout my life, it does little to let me know how I can help them and how they can help me. One of the first social networks I ever joined, the now long-ignored Ryze, had a feature whereby one could list what one had and what one wanted. It was primitive, but at least acknowledged that connections could serve as an explicit means as well as an end. Recently, I tried a site called Aardvark that uses your Facebook network to try to identify individuals who can help answer questions you might have, a socially networked spin on something like Yahoo! Answers. My results were mixed, but it was exactly the kind of functionality that should be built into Facebook.

Second, while Facebook does a decent job of keeping me connected with people I already know, it does a lousy job of identifying people who I should know. Yes, Facebook has a Friend-Finder feature, but it is based on shared backgrounds or connections and not on interests, personality, or need. There are people I want to meet who are not friends, and maybe not even friends of friends, but perhaps they could be future friends. (Of course, this relates to a long-running issue that social networks have with the inflexibility of denoting any contact a "friend" or "connection" as if this in any way reflected the diversity of connections one has in the real world.) In allowing me to learn about and make new connections, at least professionally, Twitter has beaten Facebook hands down.

And the flip side of Facebook's ability to connect me to people I might want to meet is its lack of means for me to connect people I know to each other. I remember a recent status update that elicited comments from two friends who did not know each other but whom I thought would really hit it off. I should be able to click on two or more friends, click an "Introduce" button, and provide some fodder for discussion that I think the two would enjoy discussing with each other. Sure, I could do this publicly by writing something in the non-threaded, non-rankable comments or privately by starting a messaging thread with both of them, but it's just not the same. Here's an example. A longtime acquaintance recently ran into some financial difficulties. I thought he would benefit from the experience of another longtime acquaintance who had faced similar hardships as well as another friend who I thought could offer some income opportunities. I used a patchwork of instant messaging, Twitter, e-mail and Skype to connect them to each other. It should have been three clicks in Facebook.

In short, I want Facebook not just to track and keep me connected to friends and acquaintances, but live up to its old promise of being "a social utility," one that works to help me drive maximum value to and from the people I know and keeping my network vibrant, strong and growing. That, Facebook, should be your wish as you blow out those six candles.

A major problem with the "official" retweet functionality that Twitter is running into is the tension between trying to preserve the integrity of longer messages and accommodating commentary. Lance Ulanoff wrote about part of this issue when Twitter started rolling out official retweets in beta, and his point of view has been echoed by many who retweet similarly, including me.

Twitter is clearly trying hard to preserve compatibiity with SMS, the most universal messaging capability in the world, enabling it to become the world's largest blogging network and perhaps social network. There's nothing wrong with that, but there should be capabilities for meta-information that are excluded from the discipline-inducing 140-character limit. Forget retweets. How ridiculous is it that you should get more effective characters in replying to someone with a shorter Twitter user name than a longer one?

I'm fine with keeping the content of Twitter messages at 140 characters, but there shoud be a way to accommodate feature requests of its advanced users "out of band". These users want to use Twitter for discussions and add metadata such as location, hashtags, threads, and hyperlinks without restricting the length of the content. Twitter needs to allow metadata fields that can be read by clients. Its Web site and phones that can only receive SMS can continue to participate at a basic level. This is the way the Web has worked for years -- a baseline level of compatibility with layers of complexity for formatting and metadata.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/10/yeah-ok-so-facebook-punkd-us/

1. Are your posts relevant to my professional interests?
2. Are they interesting?

I tried TwitterSnooze for the first time tonight and noted that there's a bit of a warning:

As Dave Winer points out, TwitterSnooze is not ideal because when a person is unsnoozed, Twitter will send them an email alerting that person that you are now following them again. This is an unfortunate side-effect of the only way I know to implement a "Snooze" feature (by unfollowing and then re-following a user) given the current API. If you don't like your snoozers getting alert emails, then TwitterSnooze is not for you,

So TwitterSnooze isn't completely "invisible" but I'd think most people who are snoozed would be pleased to know that you're interested enough in them to resume following them.