This Week's Face

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Hamlet is a little vague. Things. Presumably these things include faces. As in, what face are you wearing this week? A question with special meaning on Facebook, where you can look like whomever you please for whatever reason you want. Some reasons are political.

The Face of the Week phenomenon came to my notice a year back or so, when the idea spread, phage-like, that everybody should change their profile picture to whatever celebrity they most resemble. Response was surprisingly swift and widespread. It was amusing to see who looked like whom. The only rule, if you could call it that, was to keep the pic posted for one week, an arbitrary length of time. Not as fleeting as a day nor as trying as a month (a lifetime on Facebook) and just long enough to register on the newsfeed.

Then it was childhood pic week, and then favorite author week, and on and on. What I thought a one-time deal turned into an outright phenomenon. Things (that word again) turned a corner when changing your profile pic meant showing solidarity for a political cause. When the Mavi Marmara was attacked off the shores of Gaza, wearing a protest sign as profile pic displayed your sympathetic support. A long way from Let's Pretend We're Celebrities.

This week's is to fly an image of your favorite childhood cartoon character in opposition to child abuse. I can get behind that, yet the impact of changing your pic is so limited. What purpose does it really serve? I'm against it, but solidarity doesn't fight child abuse or even address it. The only people who will see your profile pic are friends, none of whom (we hope) are abusers and who are therefore already in agreement with you. Some of my friends have railed against the stupidity of taking part in such a pointless exercise; others, instead of changing their pic, posted links to get actively involved in fighting abuse against children. I did both. Does it matter?

Facebook is a self-perpetuating experiment in groupthink, where unanimity is preferred over quality decision-making, a heaven-earth mashup teeming with Hamlet's things, philosophical or otherwise, wise or foolish, altogether human. Which is not to say I take it so seriously that I believe my profile pic is of any consequence outside the arena of faces. Still, it's more fun to take part than stand apart... when it comes to things dreamt of in my philosophy.

Like and Drop

"Like and Drop" brings to mind "Lycanthrope" -could there be some kind of Twilight thing happening here? It's not the first thing on my mind, not even the last thing, to be honest, but here's hoping I don't wake up covered in hair.

I'm not funny. I've been told. A couple strangers went out of their way this week to let me know this on Facebook. Griefers, we call these folk in the world of the interwebs. Strangers who camp out with no other intent than to harass and provoke. I've felt their sting. They didn't like the videos I was posting. Unlike anyone else that found them unamusing, however, these unsolicited guests communicated in no uncertain terms that I'm not funny. Which means that not only did I waste their time, but they turned around and wasted mine in return. Hoo-rah.

What does this have to do with anything, you might ask, dear reader. What, indeed. You see, I've finally finally realized how Entrecard and Facebook are connected (and it's not that they're both a waste of time): they let you appreciate the better things, each one in its unique but connected fashion. I'll let you in on what I mean.

Something appreciated on Facebook has the option to be liked. There's a "like" button at the bottom right of everything posted on the newsfeed, and you can choose to click it or not, depending on your preference. Entrecard has a similar function, in the form of a "drop" button. A similar function in my mind, anyhow.

I don't see a great divide between "liking" and "dropping" in any other light than dropping has an attached value of Entrecard credits that can be used to advertise, in the loosest form of the word, on other blogs. The value of liking on Facebook is advertising on someone else's profile that what they posted was found worthwhile. Not terribly similar, but not miles apart, either.

Both are positive acts of reinforcement and miles apart from what griefers will do to you, at least.

24 Days and Counting

This early effort at TRON getups is amusing and I'm so very grateful they went with something else (though some might question the aesthetic sensibility of frisbees with bike helmets). Our hero wants to play keyboard in Duran Duran, while Yori has this cyber-Pocahantas vibe going that might play well at the Renaissance Fair.

I used a website to tweak the image for my Facebook profile, but they call it Obama-izing the image. Obama-izing. That doesn't sound natural or right. And for such a brutal neologism, totally inaccurate as well. You can sanitize, patronize, and weaponize, but Obama-ize? Change your birthplace to Hawai'i and we can talk. Awful, vile word. The President should be ashamed.

Till We Have FaceMail

My gripe about the lack of fmail was premature: Facebook is set to announce its new mail service on Monday. Whether this move is timed to silence me, only Zuckerberg can say; he's been very disciplined when it comes to bringing me up in casual conversation, so I don't see any reason why he should change now.

I'm glad to see fmail happening, it is a natural outgrowth of Facebook's social preponderance. Rumbles of this being a gmail killer are already being heard, as if Google is the only other party in town. Social network activity historically resembles the boom-and-crash patterns of capitalism, but when it comes to mail service users are not so fickle. How many of your friends use Hotmail? Several of mine still do. What I think will happen is that Facebook will further dominate socnets and folks will stay loyal to their mail providers, as they have for many years running.

In the meantime, I'm enjoying RockMelt -what I fondly refer to as FaceMelt, seeing how full integration of Facebook is its big gun for future browser dominance. I can dig it. The timing is good, dovetailing as it does with fmail hitting the scene: separation of my Google contacts from Facebook friends will be that much cleaner and the cognitive dissonance of mixing and matching between the two will be greatly reduced.

FaceMelt; or, life's a b, then you reboot

A friend pointed out to me, in advance of recent Halloween revelry, that the best holiday movies are the ones we ourselves create by living them. No argument there, particularly as said revelries this year were fantastic. Celebrating the harvest in San Francisco isn't what it once was, not since too many shootings in the Castro District forced the city to outlaw mass gatherings of Soylent Green-like proportions; that is to say, mass over-population that sang and danced like it was 1999. Those were the best. Still, though we might miss brighter days, it's just as fun creating new ones: it's all about having the right company along.

To a former denizen like myself, SF visits are rife with sentiment. Around every corner lurks a pocket of memory. The least expected naturally has the greatest impact, such as finding a comic shop thought gone for good. Just as gratifying was being recognized by the proprietor, Al himself, and chatting it up like it was only yesterday rather than a decade ago that we last saw each other. A moment right out of The Big Bang Theory, geek nirvana.

Family and friends made this a memorable Halloween, as they have in the past and will yet again for many more to come. Life and its fragmentary burdens underwent a soft reboot, provided by that offline service called Holiday. It makes all the difference, not least thanks to the ability to go online and further utilize it to maximum potential.

The lazy Sunday that followed was spent partially online, as we reviewed and renewed the previous night's joys by posting pics to Facebook. Happy little editors of our memories, tagging old friends and new, sharing the brilliant costumed figures who populated the night. I couldn't help but pity those in my life not blessed with a Facebook profile: they missed out!

Next year I may feel less hemmed: RockMelt lurks around the corner, with its premise of Facebook-integration. This will add yet another delightful dimension to Halloween, as FaceMelt gives distant relations sights as well as sounds of celebration, transcending borders real and imagined, coming to you like the thing itself, realer than real: we will not merely live the best holiday movies, but have an audience to cheer us and by vicarious association live the very best of times.

Looking Forward to RockMelt

I'm ready for the next thing, ready for my browser and social net to be united in the next step towards a click-free era. While my anticipation of Facebook offering email any time soon is purely optimistic, it looks like Marc Andreessen's Chrome experiment will be the next best thing. I hope to have a chance to play with RockMelt soon and get rid of this web fatigue that's been lately dogging my keystrokes.

Co-author of Mosaic/Netscape, the web's first browser, Andreessen got my hopes up for a unified service two years ago with Ning. Unfortunately it didn't pan out, but now he's having another go at web convergence. Will this one stick? With its unified presentation of mail, social service, search function and video streaming (and geospotting!), RockMelt's chances look very strong.

I'm spending more and more time offline and welcome a service that will enable me to reduce web surfing further: a one click solution is just the thing I want to maximize my online interaction. Though I've not seen any sign of it, including Skype with this new browser would make it unbeatable.

Friday Fume

I'm ready to call it quits. Not that I go to Facebook for any reason more profound than "Yo, homie, whassup?" but the stupidity reached a new high this week. It started with people calling for a boycott of the site over privacy concerns. Boycott?!? It's a social network, for crying out loud. Leave if your privates are so threatened. Then you've got a day dedicated to offending Muslims. Really? To all my friends that have stayed away from Facebook, I'm in solidarity with you. It's never been my style to tell folks they have to be part of Facebook. You are not missing out. What works for me and what I like is connecting with old friends and sharing photos, jokes, what have you, the same things most other Facebookers are there for, but what with the morons carrying on like they have been lately, I'm seriously looking at alternatives.

On that note, check this out from the always brilliant xkcd:

External Monolog

I had a conversation with a friend in the early days of cellular phones, and she expounded a theory that these portable devices are enablers of external monolog. This was before the advent of weblogging, but I think the idea fits: given a venue to express what otherwise might be bounced around in the psychodrome of one's head, folks will unload and unleash the voices once referred to as the internal monolog. That which in former centuries languished beneath the surface now finds full expression in the fin de siecle World Wide Web.

For a couple weeks I temped at a startup company whose entire purpose was to transcribe voicemails into text. Sitting in a room that would be called "airless" in the most generous terms, myself and a small cohort punched away at keyboards while legions of voice streamed into our ears. We typed out messages no more than one minute in length, ranging from lawyers' notes to affectionate asides, and converted them to emails which were forwarded to subscribers' phones. The one-to-one ratio was a limited social activity, but the basic model held true: folks offered thoughts, ruminations, arguments and reminders that would have remained unexpressed lacking the technological empowerment.

Which brings us to Facebook. More in context, we could refer to it as "Mebook".

I'm thinking specifically of an aspect in Facebook called Living Social. Replete with quizzes, questionnaires, and queries after your opinion of movies new and old, I'm at a loss what specifically is "social" about Living Social. If taken to mean that talking about personal qualities and flaunting your quirks is interactive with people around you, then this kind of "living" is indeed social. Having participated in (more than) my fair share of these, it isn't gratifying to absorb the silence that follows. Certainly there are comments that sometimes follow the publishing of results, but even when they are fun remarks from friends, the feeling I'm left with is attenuation.

Spend time around enough people and very likely you'll find that flaunting quirks does indeed amount to social behavior. What of the senses? When experiencing unique and interesting features of individuals online the transaction is conducted under a veil of silence. Visual perception alone is required. What of inflection and nuance, anunciation or even a funny accent? These are sadly absent!

Lately I've complained that people who work around me are deficient: they don't talk to themselves like I do. Why can't they engage in external monolog as fecklessly? It makes me feel lonely, as if the world were too quiet a place for true happiness.