According to this report, Facebook is about to make a dramatic change — a far more dramatic decision than the two controversial user-interface changes of the past year. Updates will soon be public by default, and searchable ala Twitter. The user will have to specify through a drop-down mechanism if they want their actions to be private.
This is clearly another move (along this Spring’s change to the User Interface and the addition of Vanity URLs) towards the functionality of Twitter. Within Twitter, users can search across the medium for trending topics, terms, or people with ease; historically, Facebook is built with walls to protect networks of friends.
Facebook’s obsession with moving in on Twitter’s territory is puzzling. It’s true that the small (and profitless) start-up has gotten a lot of publicity lately, both for its celebrity users and its ability to quickly spread news from all parts of the globe (Iranian protests in June, Mumbai attack last year). But Facebook’s growth is predicated on different strengths: private networks, photo albums, “real” people (empasizing real names over user names, for instance). Twitter doesn’t threaten any of those strengths.
Because of its greater security, far more personal information is included on facebook pages than Twitter. As Facebook is nothing without this user-generated content, it’s an open question if breaking down those defensive walls (and infuriating its persnickety users) is a good idea. Concerns over privacy are the #1 cited concern about Facebook, and this move seems to be ignoring that issue entirely.
I wonder if Facebook is taking one step too far away from what made it work, and if this will create an opening for another social network to take its place, as Myspace supplanted Friendster and Facebook supplanted Myspace.
One of the most enduring concepts in Science Fiction is that of a computer-generated reality. We have Neal Stephenson’’s metaverse, William Gibson’s cyberspace, and the fetishistic violence of the Wachowski Brothers’ Matrix. Long-running table-top roleplaying games like Shadowrun have mechanics for a hardwired online universe. The popular SciFi sub-genre of Cyberpunk trades heavily on the notion.
Of course, most of these works of speculative fiction speculate a dystopian future in which these alternate realities are worsening the human condition. Despite this, many readers of these very genres are the earliest adopters of online immersive environments such as Second Life. Second Life is an attempt to create a prototype of the metaverse: users control avatars in a three-dimensional environment that allows them to interact (via text and voice chat or IM), and visit graphically rendered indoor and outdoor environments. Without the constraints of gravity, users can fly or teleport; without the constraints of DNA, users can look like anyone or anything they want (depending on their skill manipulating sliders).
What is the practical purpose of Second Life? Vassar College has taken a stab at creating one. Amongst their various buildings — some of which resemble Vassar College campus buildings — is a near-scale replica of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. It was designed to prove a point: art and architecture benefit from the context of three-dimensional space, and the user gains far more from witnessing a carefully constructed replica than he or she can learn from viewing the images in a book. To an extent, I agree: it was interesting to see how each mural related to one another within the Sistine Chapel. I thought Vassar College was one of the best realized areas I witnessed in Second Life: beyond the Sistine Chapel, their tour-pod took my avatar all around their island, and I got to see their castle, their lecture areas, meeting rooms, and other carefully arranged spaces.
What I did not see was people.
Second Life is an interesting concept whose time has not yet come. While there is a for-profit market in MMO games like World of Warcraft, a less goal-oriented setting like Second Life doesn’t offer enough attractions to keep users coming back. While many people have signed up for Second Life, its persistent user base is far lower. This is apparent as you wander around: traveling through the SJSU SLIS campus and the adjacent Stanford University Library I was usually completely alone. When I returned to Vassar College after initially touring it with my classmates, I was the only “person” on the island. It felt eerie and off-putting. Even the libraries generally had ‘bots — lifeless humanoid comment drones — rather than real people.
The technology is part of what fails Second Life. The graphics are blocky and slow (especially compared to the latest video games). It can be slow to load and movement is awkward. In the various fictional versions I reference above, the flow between the real world and the computer-generated one is seamless; in the Matrix movie series, the humans aren’t even aware they are living in fiction. I suspect many people try Second Life and only a very small percentage return. The user interface has not advanced at all in the two years since I last tried Second Life — what other websites cease to advance? When will a younger, smarter company replace Linden Labs? I feel it’s only a matter of time before Second Life is ousted by somebody offering better tech, which will draw many more users.
It’s impossible to escape the fakeness of Second Life. And unlike online social networking tools like Facebook, no one uses their real name — I toured libraries with people I knew were my classmates without knowing which classmates they were! I feel this diminishes the professional potential of Second Life. Instead, Second Life can only serve as an escape valve from the “real world”, a place to be something you’re not. While that may hold some appeal, it’s at odds with what I think it should be best at: meetings and conferences, where networking and making real-life connections are paramount.
I did have the opportunity to speak with a couple librarians and that did help me gain a more positive appreciation of Second Life. The first was “Jenymn Mersand” who I first encountered while “speaking” with a fellow student on the SLIS Virtual Campus. She overheard our misgivings and filled us in on some of the aspects she likes about Second Life. She is a real-life librarian and instructor in New Mexico. For her, Second Life was a great way to attend conferences and work on projects with librarians who lived too far away to meet in person.
The second librarian I spoke with was “Liatris Tidewater” who served at the Reference Desk of the Alliance Library in Second Life. She’s a real life librarian on the staff of Florida State University’s Science Library. While she was a very enthusiastic Second Life user and volunteer librarian — logging two hours per week at the reference desk, going back two years — even she admitted that 80-85% of the reference questions pertained to Second Life, mostly from beginners unsure of how to edit their appearances or move around. More damningly, she admitted that of the “Real Life” reference questions, she had yet to handle any that she’d compare to an academic reference question — in two years! While I appreciate her enthusiasm and commitment to the medium, I think that’s strong evidence that library services are not strongly in demand in Second Life — or not in demand at all.
Of the various libraries I visited — including Stanford University’s, the Alliance Library, the “Library of Illumination Island”, Montclair State University’s, and various smaller libraries or special collections — none aside from Alliance had a live staffer. Most were elaborate shells for links to websites that launched in my regular browser. I could get to all of these resources faster — much faster — directly on the web. The only area that seemed to offer something a library website might not was the Rare Book Collection at the Stanford University Library — its oversized displays showing images from Incunabulum in the Stanford collection were quite impressive and very beautifully rendered.
Slideshow metadata available in the fullscreen mode.
Second Life’s strength is its ability to create larger than life three-dimensional images; its weakness is the actual display of textual information. The Stanford Library Rare Books area was great, but the main Stanford Library on Second Life was a hollow hall, with twenty books on the shelf, each of which was just a link to the Google Books version on the World Wide Web. I have more books on the little set of shelves behind my desk — which is in my kitchen. And Google Books is bookmarked on my browser.
I believe that immersive environments have a future — but I’m not sure they have a present.
To update my post on social bookmarking, it would seem I reviewed a short-lived service in furl. It has now been absorbed by diigo, which calls itself a web “highlighter”. Such is the nature of the world wild web.
Furl informed me by email that:
The Furl team is very pleased to announce that Furl has become part of Diigo.com. We worked hard to find Furl a home where loyal users like you could continue to benefit from best-of-breed social bookmarking and annotation tools. Hands down, Diigo.com was the winner due to its innovative approach to online research tools and knowledge sharing.
The Diigo team is dedicated to making sure you continue to get top notch features and service. They’ve got a crack team of technologists who love making research and knowledge sharing as easy and efficient as possible. Exporting your data from Furl to Diigo is super easy.
We feel fortunate to have been able to serve as your social bookmarking site provider and can’t thank you enough for your loyal support over the past four years. We’ll miss you and we wish you the best as part of the Diigo community.
I wonder if diigo would get my vote over delicious?
Looks tasty, does it not? Delicious, perhaps? Del.icio.us (and its newer, friendlier to the eye url, delicious.com) has become one of the poster children for “Web 2.0″ applications. Why is it so popular? What advantages does it offer? What makes it so tasty?
I would posit the single biggest reason for its popularity is its portability. Few heavy internet users — the omnivores of the ether — spend their whole time using one computer. Many have a computer at work, and a computer at home. Perhaps both a desktop and a laptop, or a Mac and a PC. For users with more than one computer, Delicious offers one simple, elegant solution to retaining bookmarks; instead of lodging them all in a browser or browser toolbar, contained to one machine, their bookmarks are automatically transferred to an online database and retrievable from any machine. It’s one of the key principles of “cloud computing“, and Delicious does it simply and intuitivly.
While I believe that is Delicious’ single most appealing aspect, it certainly isn’t the end of its usefulness. In fact, the system is designed to be much more: a human-powered search algorithm, encouraging its educated user-base to tag their favorite pages across the wide expanse of the internet frontier. By applying folksonomic tags to every page, the users provide the means to search terms for sites already approved of by discerning readers. It’s an end-around to Google’s computer driven matrix and can help bypass commercial junk in favor of genuine, interesting pages.
So naturally I searched for my own page to see what would come up. Specifically, the word pinakes. Now, I certainly own no copyright to the word; it is ancient in origin and naturally appealing to librarians, archivists and catalogers so I was not surprised by the range of pages returned in a Delicious search. Amongst its 46 appearances, it brought me to search portals, a model database for scientific artifacts (that one seemed particularly cool: I might tag it myself), a Spanish-language online education periodical, an art blog in a Cyrillic alphabet (which language I could not say, nor its relation to the pinakes), a wiki-manual for an Italian information database, and even two bookmarks pointing to this humble blog — and I’m only responsible for one of them. I have a reader! The user in question, who I do not know, thought to tag this website under “web”, “2.0″, and “library” — not bad.
The ability to funnel users, networks or tags into RSS feeds only gives Delicious even greater versatility. As it continues to expand its user base, it will be interesting to see to what degree social bookmarking replaces the shotgun approach of traditional search engines.
