The Buie Knife

The New Celebrity: You

Watch this at The Onion. Report: Every Potential 2040 Presidential Candidate Is Unelectable Due to Facebook. 

A few years ago, if you received 100 birthday wishes, you would feel like a minor if not major celebrity. Nowadays, Facebook friends shower such attention on each other that a first birthday celebrated on the social grid can be a bit overwhelming. When you receive greetings from all parts of your life from all over the world, you realize how small the world has become as a result of the proliferation of Internet technology.

By your third or fourth birthday celebrated on social media, you begin to get a little skeptical that all these people are really thinking of you and wishing you a happy birthday. Automated services that wish "happy birthday" to Facebook connections make one cynical. This year on my birthday I got good birthday wishes from my teenage son who is at a wilderness camp in the Western U.S. and I know he is not online for six weeks. David Plotz in Slate added to my cynicism with his funny piece, "What happened when I celebrated my Facebook birthday on July 11. And July 25. And July 28."

I've been on Facebook since mid-2007. In five years I've posted nearly 1,000 photos, and 50 videoclips; 150 photos of me have been posted. At 14, my son was fairly indifferent to Facebook -- he rarely checked his wall or newsfeed -- and yet 256 photos and 13 videos (totalling 26 minutes) had been posted of him by family members or friends. Has he lost complete control of his image (or never had it)? Probably so. Just like nearly every other teenager.

If just 25 photos a year (a very low number for most teens) are posted of my son online for the rest of his life (assuming he lives to just 70), by the time he reaches the Biblical three score and 10, he'll have a collection of 1,375 photos. In sharp contrast, only a couple of dozen photos of my maternal grandmother's ENTIRE LIFE survive to this day; less than a dozen photos of my maternal grandfather survive; and maybe six photos of my paternal grandparents survive from their ENTIRE LIVES. Certainly more published photographs exist of the average teenager today than of celebrities from the 20th century like Charles Lindburgh or maybe even Marilyn Monroe. Nearly everyone nowadays has to fight off the paparazzi. 

Does the proliferation of digital photography and public display of formerly private family photos foster narcissism, vanity and an emphasis on appearances? I dunno. Looking over the photos of myself posted by friends and family members from years ago, I see myself in a different light. Some photos of events, in my mind's eye, were during really happy times, yet in the photos I am grimacing, frowning or looking uphappy. Other events in my mind's eye I remember as during a difficult period of my life. Yet in the photos I look like the picture of happiness. So we shouldn't automatically assume that one picture is worth a thousand words. Pictures are simply snapshots of a moment in time and can be unrepresentative of events, how you're feeling or what you're thinking.

One thing is certain: Bill Gates' prediction in his 1995 book, "The Road Ahead" that we would achieve the "totally documented life" has certainly come true. 

[T]he highway will also make it possible for an individual to keep track of his or her own whereabouts--to lead what we might call “a documented life.” Your wallet PC will be able to keep audio, time, location, and eventually even video records of everything that happens to you. It will be able to record every word you say and every word said to you, as well as body temperature, blood pressure, barometric pressure, and a variety of other data about you and your surroundings. It will be able to track your interactions with the highway--all of the commands you issue, the messages you send, and the people you call or who call you. The resulting record will be the ultimate diary and autobiography, if you want one. Bill Gates, The Road Ahead (New York: Viking, 1996), p. 303.

Tammy Erickson at Harvard Business Review observes that for the new generation of "digital natives" -- those who cannot remember a time when the Internet did not exist - - physical space has been devalued. "Technology connections are how people meet, express ideas, define identities, and understand each other."

This brave new world in which we are all mini-celebrities -- "famous" to a few hundred or a few thousand people -- is probably changing us in ways we can only begin to perceive. Like other transformative technologies like the automobile, air conditioning, motion pictures, and television, It will be years before we know the full impact of social networking on humans.

Can Google+ Compete With or Replace Facebook?

Just joined Google+. I'd have to invest a lot of time in it to equal the value of Facebook to me. Facebook has 750 million members, and will probably reach a billion members world-wide in a few years. Just starting out, Google+ already has 10 million users. Just a few years ago, MySpace.com was the dominant social network, and Facebook ate its lunch by offering a better experience.

I suspect, however, that most people, who are not digerati, will not invest time in another social networking service. My wife and extended family have no interest in Google+, for example. Despite the hype that Google+ might be a Facebook killer, all FB has to do is copy those parts of Plus that are successful and most popular, just as Plus has copied parts of FB that work well. I'm glad there's a competitor to FB -- no one company should have a monopoly on our online lives. It will contribute to innovation, but also perhaps to the fragmentation of social networking.

Related: Inside Google+: How the Search Giant Plans to Go Social (Wired magazine in-depth article)

Peer Pressure to Join a Social Network

There are now more negative consequences from being off Facebook or other social networks than being on them -- ie, not knowing what your kids are up to, not knowing who people are in your neighborhood, workplace, profession, etc., not knowing about social events you want to be at. I have friends and relatives who don't use social networking sites. Photos, they insist, are something printed on paper that you hold in your hand. As a result, nobody sees their photos, or knows what they are up to. They miss out on the photos, stories and adventures of their extended family and friends.

In the future, if not now, people who don't use Facebook (or maybe Google+, if it takes off) are increasingly isolated and out of the loop. The younger generation views them as luddites, not "with it," strange, curmudgeons, cranks. You may call that tyranny, but it is almost already fact.

We're All Bloggers Now

I notice that I blog less here on Typepad because of Facebook and Twitter-- most conversations take place on FB, rather than on the blog. And it is now much easier and faster to tweet a link to an interesting article or share it on Facebook than to go into Typepad and summarize it. Posting on Facebook to a very tangible audience of friends and acquaintances feels a lot more like the real world than blogging to the larger and amorphous Internet.

I think civic and cultural conversation is being enhanced by the distributive model of Facebook, rather than on anonymous blogs and newspaper commenting services where flame wars, hostile and bigoted comments tend to dominate.

I still appreciate the value of blogs to aggregate content on specific topics in more depth like I'm doing on my Turkey blog, or to be a part of the Google zeitgeist of information and ideas that people search on. My blogs are a permanent spot on on the web, compared to FB posts which are here today and gone tomorrow. If you happen not to log into FB for a week, you may have missed your friend's important announcement or useful insight.

Privacy Concerns

My friend Roch Smith Jr. makes a case against Facebook because of privacy concerns, charging that "corporate surveillance" is a real danger. Most people, as evidenced by Facebook's explosive growth and massive membership, just don't see this is a major threat. It's not real or tangible to them. I see the main privacy problem originating with thoughtless users who reveal too much and post TMI. I can't believe some of the critical things some people post about their spouses or bosses. Where is their sense of discretion? 

Facebook is ultimately accountable to its members, and when it infringes on their rights in ways they find objectionable, they will certainly let FB know, as they already have, and FB has responded with refinements. Or they will leave en masse -- my guess is that Facebook will do whatever it takes to maintain the confidence of its users.

FB has already shown itself responsive to privacy concerns -- conceding that the data and pictures you post are YOURS. You CAN download them and delete your account if you wish, and eventually upload your data to another service instead.

But presumably, the same dangers would arise from Google+. The data Facebook and Google collect on us is for marketing purposes, to refine the ads we see so that they are really appealing. I was surprised the other day when I saw the ads Google gmail was pitching at me, using key words from emails I had sent. The ads were quite relevant to what I might buy. I wasn't creeped out by it, I found it convenient. It's not like they give a damn who I am personally or what I do.

Early Adopter

I was one of those people who joined America Online back in 1992, because I was assigned by my employer to create an online network for it. I immediately saw the magical potential of social networking, both in cyberspace and in the real world, and have created dozens of online social networks for various causes and communities. But it has been a long slog to create sustainable online networks that work well for the long haul.

AOL tapped into something I believe the public wants -- a protected, safe online community that enhances real community among friends, empowers citizens to "become the media," mobilize quickly on causes and in support or in opposition to ideas. But AOL essentially died because its customer service was awful, customer accounts were overwhelmed with spam, and it could never offer a viable justification for consumers paying for it once broadband rolled out.

Yahoo.com became king of the social networking hill back in the late 1990s, early 2000s. I started or joined dozens of Yahoo groups. But Yahoo, too, was overwhelmed with spam and lost its edge.

In 2003, I joined Meetup.com and Friendster.com, thinking they would be the next big things in social networking. They were a fad for about a year or less, followed by MySpace.com, which I joined but  never did much with or found much use for. Then came LinkedIn.com, which I'm still a member of, but don't find routine reasons to go there. I think the valuation of LinkedIn.com (shares passed the $100 mark) is over-rated.

More than 1000 "Friends" on Facebook

I've been on Facebook since 2007, and recently passed the 1,000 "friend" marker. Many of them are Turkish students I've taught, and there's not a whole lot of communication we engage in since they don't know English well and I don't speak or understand a lot of Turkish. I've set up a Facebook group for English Language learners. Maybe it will take off, or maybe it won't.

I tend to agree with researchers who say that you can't be real friends with more than about 150 people. But how do you decide who to let in and who to exclude? Friendship in the real world is often determined in part by proximity. In the virtual world, it's problematic that no such limitations exist. Are you automatically "friends" with the thousands, perhaps millions of people, you share interests or values with? Facebook, as yet, doesn't offer much help to solve this problem.

Facebook's Achievement

Facebook has its problems. It's too difficult to organize friends and acquaintances, there's too much clutter, too much extraneous information, it's too easy to lose privacy and boundaries aren't clear.

The lack of boundaries between work, home, school, family and friends is both FB's strength and weakness. It means ideas spread much faster, and you might bond or find unknown connections with acquaintances, but people run a much greater risk of exposing themselves in ways that others find objectionable.

Overall, it seems to me Facebook achieves the vision first set out by Howard Rheingold in "The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier" back in his 1993 book, talking about The Well, a pioneering online community in the San Francisco bay area. Entrepreneurs tried for more than a decade after that book came out to recreate The Well experience on a national or international level, but nothing has succeeded as well as Facebook.

Facebook is here to stay, and it's changing human behavior, for better and for worse. (That's another post!)

What Google+ Offers That Facebook Doesn't

Can Google+ kill or even equal Facebook? I doubt it. Most people don't have time to maintain two social networking sites. I can see some new uses for Google+, especially as it integrates with other existing Google products:

• Better (Free) Group Video Chat: Facebook offers free Skype-to-Skype audio and video calls, but group video calls must be paid for. Google's "hangouts" offers free group video calls, for up to 10 people.
• Better Email Integration: Enhanced communication among Gmail users. Email is difficult to manage if you get a lot of it. Facebook's email program is unwieldy. Google+ offers new ways to manage email and video-conferencing as it integrates Gmail and Google+.
• Better News Aggregation: The Google+ Sparks service goes out and fetches news or websites related to interests we pinpoint.
• Better Control Over Who Sees Your Photos: I have friends who prefer to post their pictures to Google Picasa than to Facebook. I like the photo "tagging" feature of FB, but perhaps they feel their "image" is out of control on FB.
• Better Search:  By knowing my interests, Google can refine searches and present me with information I'm more interested in.
• Better Targeted Advertising based on the key words that appear in my email and searches.

I'll watch with curiosity to see how Google+ develops.

Related:

• My Social Media, Social Networking, Online Neighborhoods, and Electronic Democracy Blog of Links and Aggregated Content.

Starting Young

Just responded to a "friend" request on Facebook from a 14-year-old student I know slightly who describes his relationship status as "it's complicated." I bet!!!

I can't imagine the contortions teenagers, twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings put themselves through these days to declare (or not declare) their relationship status on Facebook. What a big step it must be to change one's FB relationship status!

Online Neighborhoods in U.S. Have 8 Million Participants, Tens of Thousands of Hosts

I labored in the field of online neighborhood development from 1997 to 2005. I thought for sure the phenomenon would take off as a way to give neighborhoods a greater sense of community and more civic power or empowerment. In my own neighborhood of Takoma Park, MD., I saw how much difference a wired neighborhood could make. Maybe the phenomenon did take off, under the radar. Steven Clift of E-Democracy.org, who has had a vision of electronic democracy even longer than I have, posted data hidden in the a Pew Internet survey indicating that EIGHT MILLION Americans now participate in online neighborhoods. He's also suggesting that list managers share best practices. Check out his blog. For my many observations on best and worst practices, see the Online Neighborhoods section of this blog. 

BTW, Facebook now has 400 million members, and still growing. There's no question that it has added a new dimension to online communities, indeed it may be the "killer application" that actually implements the vision for the e-world outlined by Howard Rheingold in his book, "Virtual Community" in 1993.

Maybe Facebook Hasn't Won the Social Networking Wars. Now There's Ning

I recently pronounced that "Facebook has become the dominant social networking portal." With 200 million users and growing, it does seem unlikely that any other social network is going to beat FB in numbers, especially MySpace, the nearest competitor, which has undergone a leadership change since losing the numbers war with Facebook. But numbers of registered users don't mean much if you don't have a viable revenue model, especially with industry-wide declines in advertising. At some point within the next year, Facebook will probably have to start charging a segment of its users a monthly or annual fee ($10 a year?).

Recently I've been invited to join two local, niche social networks -- Inside919, for businessmen and women seeking opportunities in the 919 area code, and HKActivists.com, for progressive networkers in North Carolina --  both hosted on the Ning platform. Ning as of April 15, 2009 had two million registered users, 200,000 active social networks (users can create their own), and a BUSINESS MODEL -- very targeted advertising, plus network creators pay $50 a month for premium tools.

Ning Chief Executive Gina Bianchini tells Eric Eldon of VentureBeat: "Facebook already owns who you know — who you went to college with, who you grew up with. Twitter owns real-time and news communications. But Ning has become the place to go for finding a social network of people who share the same interests as you, Bianchini believes."

Maybe. We'll see what kind of value Ning social networks can create. One problem: we could spend all day going from email to email group lists to Facebook, LinkedIn.com, Twitter, newspaper web sites, various Ning networks, various blogs, Youtube and other video sites, and get absolutely nothing tangible accomplished.

One of the largest Ning sites belongs to rapper 50 Cent, whose site Thisis50.com has more than 430,000 registered users. Another successful Ning network is led by Seth Godin, author of Tribes, a book about social networking. His Ning network is by invitation only, but there's lots of free stuff here.

Drill Deeper:

• Ning's Blog
• Wikipedia entry on Ning
• Personal Democracy Forum Podcast with Ning Executive Gina Bianchini on Using Ning to Build Your Own Social Network

Some NC online communities on NING

• Wilmington, NC: http://3rdstreetplaza.ning.com and http://wilmingtonbusinessonline.ning.com/
• Monroe, NC: http://unioncountync.ning.com
• Matthews, NC: http://matthewsrecord.ning.com/
• Chapel Hill, NC: http://orangecitizens.ning.com/
• Asheville, NC: http://9-12projectashevillenc.ning.com/
• Charlotte, NC: http://www.socialmediacharlotte.com/
• Chatham County, NC: http://chathamncschools.ning.com and http://chatham-nc.ning.com/

Social Networking for Business Goes Local, With Targeted Advertising

Martin Brossman and Pat Howlett have founded Inside919, a free social networking community for business women and men working and living within the 919 area code of North Carolina. It operates on the Ning.com platform and already has more than 1,400 registered users. They've developed a presentation on "how a business can utilize social media to give a competitive edge in today's business climate, especially in a small town. Small town businesses are in a unique situation. Learn how to capitalize on this uniqueness and help a business explode with growth, while supporting the economy of the host town."

Noting the fragmentation of media and decline in audiences for traditional advertising -- yellow pages, daily newspapers, cable television, commercial radio -- the site is promoting LocalAdLink.com, "using geo-targeting technology which determines the physical location of a web site visitor and delivers different content to that visitor based on his or her location (zip code)." The site also discourages sending spam -- bulk email.

The site has a multi-user blog that each member can contribute to. Some of the blog posts just look like advertising, but some are pretty good. This site has promise. Seems to me that it is a local answer to LINKEDIN.COM, which in my view has stalled in its development compared to Facebook. People like to do business with people they can meet face-to-face. I doubt many actual deals have resulted from LINKEDIN.COM "connections." Inside919 is part of www.insideareacodes.com, which is based on the idea that many business people do most of their business within 20 miles of home.

Drill Deeper:

• Social Media, Social Networks, Online Neighborhoods and Electronic Democracy Blog

Testing New Business Models for Hyperlocal Journalism

The collapse of the daily newspaper industry may ultimately have a revitalizing effect on media. The big metro dailies that are in such financial trouble today may be like the old mass-produced beers such as Schlitz, "the beer that made Milwaukee famous" that ran into financial trouble in the 1970s and is now produced in very small quantities. "Look at what microbreweries have done for beer," Dan Gillmor noted in a talk I attended at UNC's School of Journalism and Mass Communication (JOMC).

Indeed, sampling blogs and small online journalistic enterprises at bag lunches and meetups may become a widespread hobby like sampling beers at microbreweries. The obstacle so far, of course, is that this "new journalism" hasn't found a way to sustain itself financially. The beer is essentially given away for FREE.

Alan Murray, a UNC grad who now heads up the Wall Street Journal's online media efforts, also spoke recently at the JOMC. Professor Ryan Thornburg "tweeted" Murray's talk:

The newspaper biz never more "exciting", "vibrant", "filled with possibilities"...WSJ free audience from 8M to 20M uniques per month. Pay subscribers grow from 900K to 1.1M....Public won't be poorly served if number of DC reporters drops by 75%. As long as the remaining 25 don't do pack journalism..."I look at the Drudge Web site every day." ... "He's just a very good editor." EXACTLY!..."Every journalist today is in effect marketing his own copy."...“do what you do best, and link to the rest” ...Does #WSJ biz model work for local public affairs news? http://is.gd/qvik

Five tips on charging for content, from Alan Murray.

Dan Conover contends in "2020 Vision: What's Next for News" that the sooner that slowly dying debt-ridden metro dailies disappear, the sooner new business models will emerge. National newspapers may rebound by 2010, local papers with circulations of 30,000 or less will continue to be profitable, but "the hybrid beast known as the metro daily is in trouble, and most will not survive past 2010 in their traditional configurations," he writes. These metro newspapers are taking up the market space in which innovation must occur, he writes. They are limiting serious competition in their markets. "What succeeds in the shadow of an established metro, therefore, may not be what ultimately winds up contending for the market positions vacated by Old Media giants." (Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)

'Hyperlocal' blogs and websites such as EveryBlock, Outside.in, Placeblogger and Patch are startups trying to find business models. They are looking to persuade small businesses that serve neighborhoods to advertise online rather than (or in addition to) the Yellow Pages. My friend Peter Krasilovsky, an analyst with the Kelsey Group who blogs at LocalOnliner.com, estimates this online ad market to be $32 billion by 2013. "Hyperlocal Websites Deliver News Without Newspapers," an article in The New York Times, explains. There's a good discussion over at Edcone's blog here and here about  the NYT article, with the publisher of the Raleigh Telegram offering his sober experience.

"Internet companies have been trying to develop such sites for more than a decade, in part as a way to lure local advertisers to the Web," the Times reports. As someone who launched a "hyperlocal" Internet publication for Takoma Park, MD back in the 1990s, by necessity more as an avocation than a vocation, I know a bit about this.

I started in 1997 not with a business motivation but to mobilize neighbors electronically to address rising crime in the neighborhood. Eventually my email listserv reached more than 50 percent of the homes in my subdivision. More than 20 other email listservs in the town of 20,000 cropped up as a way for members of subdivisions to communicate. The challenge was that neighbors on these lists rarely communicated with each other, so I created one list to aggregate news and discussions for the entire town.  

I had to have the flexibility to realize that one thing I learned in journalism school could not apply to this bootstrapped venture -- there could be no wall of separation between advertising sales and writers/editors. I sold ads to local advertisers and produced journalistic content. My modest efforts reached at most a few thousand people and brought in a few thousand dollars per year. I continued publication until I moved from the area in 2005.

Early in the venture, I tried to interest The Washington Post in hyperlocal online publications, but instead they invested in top-down rather than bottom-up online publications that failed. 

The metric I developed was that 2000 unique locally-based website visitors/users were worth about $2 each to collective local advertiser revenue. So even with 10,000 uniques, you couldn't generate more than $20K in ad revenue. Perhaps in neighborhoods with denser population, more commercial development and a far more aggressive ad sales rep than I was you could do better.

Another metric I developed was that a locally-based email list of say, 2000, with ads integrated tastefully into a regular email newsletter and website, would over the course of a year or so, generate 20 customers for a local business. To a real estate agent, a car dealer, or other businesses selling high-end products or services, a real prospect is worth hundreds of dollars and a sale or referral from the site is worth thousands of dollars of advertising.

So the challenge for locally-based online businesses is identifying and delivering real prospects to your advertisers.

When online can do that, local advertisers will value it more than they do print ads. Publishers still have to PROVE the value of online ads to local advertisers. I'm interested to see if online social networking will offer profitable returns for advertisers without being so obnoxious site users are driven away. That MIGHT provide a new revenue stream for online publishers.

Initially, giving one real estate agent exclusive rights to advertise on the hyperlocal site was of more value to him than if I let 10 real estate advertisers do so.

Based on my experience, I believe successful hyperlocal online publications, will have to: 

• have a web-to-print mentality rather than a print-to-web mentality.
• work in alliance or in conjunction with local monthly or weekly print publications that already have an ad sales force, or with the expectation that a monthly or weekly print publication will eventually be produced as interest and demand increases.
• Some, perhaps many readers and advertisers, still want to see a print publication. The online habits of over-35 readers are not yet such that they will seek out online publications.
• work in alliance or conjunction with neighborhood-based email listservs or web-based neighborhood lists. Email listservs inevitably have more readership and participation than web-based services, but the problem may be that they produce too much email unless in "digest" mode.
• Local media fragmentation is a problem. Many locales have several publications, online and off, that cover them haphazardly and inconsistently, while no one covers them CONSISTENTLY, THOROUGHLY and WELL. Any successful hyper-local site must aggregate content from all sources. The recession may have at least one positive effect, leading to consolidation of local media sources and reducing fragmentation.
• I would insist that reporters, editors and ad reps for these publications live in the neighborhoods they cover, and promote the work of local bloggers. I don't think national corporate aggregator sites will be able to attract a critical mass of local advertisers.
• Hyper-local sites should take advantage of the viral marketing capability of Facebook, and the ability of FB to promote hyperlocal content in status updates.

Despite the continuing struggle to find viable business models, hyperlocal web publications as an avocation or a volunteer effort do add value to a community.

I have followed developments in the field for more than a decade and you can find links to the intellligence I've collected here.

Despite Growing Pains, Facebook May Become the Next Google

With all the terrible media industry news -- declining and bankrupt newspapers, mass media advertising way down and not nearly as effective as it used to be, one of the few growth areas is Facebook. It is rapidly becoming the dominant social networking portal, projects a 70 percent increase in revenue from 2008 to 2009, with possibilities for an IPO within the next year. Though there was some loud negative feedback from FB users over the implentation of a new home page design, Facebook's growth has not been stymied by the change. It breaks 200 million users the first week in April 2009, not long after its fifth anniversary. In March, 2009, it was the number one website in the U.S. based on time spent. (Updated)

Some tech sages predict that "Facebook is the new Google, and Google is the next Microsoft" because most applications will be on "the cloud" -- on the web -- rather than on your PC, and Google is creating applications for the web.

One of the chief inhibitants to growth among older users is the perception, expecially among baby boomers, that the Facebook generation cares nothing about privacy. Overshadowed by the abrupt departure of its CFO was news that Facebook has hired Timothy Sparapani, the senior attorney for the online-privacy-concerned American Civil Liberties Union, as its Director of Public Policy...

To help Facebook users upset by the clutter of the new design, InsideFacebook.com (not an official organ of FB) has posted some great pointers to make the home page less cluttered, how to customize it, better manage friends' status updates. and easier to find information from friends you care most about. Click.

Meanwhile, an Australian study found that workplace Internet leisure browsing actually makes people more productive. FB recently celebrated its fifth birthday, and The New York Times asked some important questions about the burgeoning service, such as, "Is It Growing UP too fast?"

Event marketers should be aware of a new FB service: from a cell phone, users can become members and fans of FB groups.

Skeptics remember that America Online was in a similar dominant position in the 1990s. "The history of social networks is an absurd one of missed opportunities," Vanessa Grigoriadis writes in New York magazine, mentioning Tripod, Geocities, AOL and Friendster. And now we're seeing the decline of MySpace, which was twice the size of FB in 2008, but has stagnant growth while Facebook zooms ahead. The biggest of these missed opportunities was AOL. But in my judgment, Facebook doesn't have the two terminal obstacles that AOL had. Broadband, spam and "walled gardens" killed AOL -- it was "the Internet on training wheels." Now FB has created a new kind of "walled garden" that works better than AOL did because it gives users control over who they let in.

Grigoriadis observes: "Everyone on Facebook wished me well, which I know not to be the case in the real world; and, most important, there was nothing messy or untoward or unpleasant—the technology controlled human interaction, keeping everyone at a perfect distance, not too close and not too far away, in a zone where I rarely felt weird or lame or like I had said the wrong thing, the way one often feels in the real world. This is the promise of Facebook, the utopian hope for it: the triumph of fellowship; the rise of a unified consciousness; peace through superconnectivity, as rapid bits of information elevate us to the Buddha mind, or at least distract us from whatever problems are at hand. In a time of deep economic, political, and intergenerational despair, social cohesion is the only chance to save the day, and online social networks like Facebook are the best method available for reflecting—or perhaps inspiring—an aesthetic of unity."

Drill Deeper:

• Do you own Facebook? Or does Facebook own you? New York Magazine piece.
• LivingSocial Takes Top Spot Among Facebook Apps, Edging Out 'Causes'

Using the Internet to Expand Community Watch

Direct link

Greensboro tries a new approach, with GreensboroCommunityWatch.com. Reminds me of what my neighborhood in Takoma Park, MD did in the 1990s using email networks. I did a piece for The Washington Post in 1997 about it. The National Crime Prevention Council did an article on our work. I was quoted. Excerpt:

Future of News: Cool Neighborhood News Aggregators

Outside.in gives you news of your neighborhood and town from multiple sources across the web. It apparently determines the news most interesting to you by the IP address (location) of your internet connection, or you can post your location for a more precise aggregation of news of interest to you. You can also subscribe to receive an email of neighborhood-based news twice a week, or subscribe to a syndication feed of local news. The site was created by Steven Berlin Johnson and others. He's got a good, optimistic assessment of the state of the news business, "Old Growth Media and the Future of News," on his blog. I particularly like his illustration of the new news ecosystem.

Johnson writes: "I am bullish on the future of news, as you can tell. But I am not bullish on what is happening right now in the newspaper industry. It is ugly, and it is going to get uglier.