During the first two years, Facebook required users to actively seek information about their friends. There wasn’t a steady stream of updates flowing about yet, allowing us to be ambiently aware.. a phrase that is buzzing hard since Clive Thompson’s article in the NY Times, “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy” a must read, especially if you don’t completely “get” all this social networking stuff.
“Browsing Facebook was like constantly poking your head into someone’s room to see how she was doing. It took work and forethought. In a sense, this gave Facebook an inherent, built-in level of privacy, simply because if you had 200 friends on the site — a fairly typical number — there weren’t enough hours in the day to keep tabs on every friend all the time.”
In September, 2006 the News Feed came to life, a built in service that would broadcast the edits made on a user’s page to all of their friends.
“When students woke up that September morning and saw News Feed, the first reaction, generally, was one of panic. Just about every little thing you changed on your page was now instantly blasted out to hundreds of friends, including potentially mortifying bits of news — Tim and Lisa broke up; Persaud is no longer friends with Matthew — and drunken photos someone snapped, then uploaded and tagged with names. Facebook had lost its vestigial bit of privacy. For students, it was now like being at a giant, open party filled with everyone you know, able to eavesdrop on what everyone else was saying, all the time.”
When the News Feed and sharing of info and photos was first introduced, people bugged out and many protested the changes. Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg reacted only by offering users more privacy controls, and kept the News Feed in place. A gamble that went in his favor - within days people began to contact Mark to tell him how much it was helping to learn things they would not have discovered otherwise.
Zuckerberg argues that the “News Feed is central to Facebook’s success. “Facebook has always tried to push the envelope,” he said. “And at times that means stretching people and getting them to be comfortable with things they aren’t yet comfortable with. A lot of this is just social norms catching up with what technology is capable of.”
No one realized how addictive the constant flow of info and up to the minute updates would be, “Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye. Facebook is no longer alone in offering this sort of interaction online. In the last year, there has been a boom in tools for “microblogging”: posting frequent tiny updates on what you’re doing. The phenomenon is quite different from what we normally think of as blogging, because a blog post is usually a written piece, sometimes quite long: a statement of opinion, a story, an analysis. But these new updates are something different. They’re far shorter, far more frequent and less carefully considered. One of the most popular new tools is Twitter, a Web site and messaging service that allows its two-million-plus users to broadcast to their friends haiku-length updates — limited to 140 characters, as brief as a mobile-phone text message — on what they’re doing. There are other services for reporting where you’re traveling (Dopplr) or for quickly tossing online a stream of the pictures, videos or Web sites you’re looking at (Tumblr). And there are even tools that give your location. When the new iPhone, with built-in tracking, was introduced in July, one million people began using Loopt, a piece of software that automatically tells all your friends exactly where you are.”
It’s not a single tweet or status update that creates the ambient awareness, but an aggregation of all the info. Over time each tweet is a piece of a bigger ongoing story. And often when people get together, it’s as if they were never really apart, allowing them to pickup on conversations or thoughts from just that afternoon. It’s this constant movement of info that makes for the small town feel in which you’re always in tune with what your family and friends are doing.
There will be a lot more to come here in the social networking arena, but for now… if this is of any interest to you - ya gotta read the full article.