"Can I say you're my girlfriend on Facebook?"

Count me in as hoping FB is like Myspace in 5 years and we are all onto something so much better.

as someone who has three different social networking things that he checks daily (well, one is a business networking thing), and with facebook being the only non-GPS-using site of those, i figure it'll happen soon enough.

also, everyone OTM regarding the slow rollout in colleges and universities. in some ways, i miss those heady early days, when it was far-flung friends saying 'hey' over a long summer or from across a pond. in Poland in 2005, i remember all the kids in this program i was attending were like, 'why can't we have facebook, it looks so fun!' now they're all on it.

since it started with ivy league colleges getting people to authenticate their real selves before using the site, it moved the internet away from anonymity and towards people admitting who they really were IRL: which was a milestone

yeah for sure - it's a total 180˚, to the extent where nowadays i get mildly creeped out if i don't know who someone is online, and tend to only interact w/people who've been "authenticated" (ie preferably i know their actual identity, but if not then i know the contacts or routes through which they know me)

it worked out v well indeed but to claim their whole path to success was planned out and intentional is giving fb too much credit - theres a lot of luck involved - but its also that kind of luck that people who are good at what they do often have

feel like fb catching on to the value of developer driven culture relatively early was v key - but even that is not maybe totally intentional - its just what zuckerbro likes

I agree that it was a lot of luck - mostly luck that myspace didn't clean its act up

yeah but there was never any hope of myspace figuring it out - they were a company run buy marketing people who were bought fairly early on by an old media concern who had no idea what to do w/them - fb absolutely understands how to organize themselves to do the job

was thinking about this last night:

let's say it's 1998 and facebook-type site gets developed, gets lots of press and media attention and everybody's heard about it in the same way that everybody's heard about ebay. could it have caught on a decade earlier? obv not to the same extent cause there were far fewer daily internet users, but it doesn't seem entirely impossible that the people who were daily internet users at that point could have all joined a massive social network.

i dont think it was really possible for a number of reasons to create facebook 12 years ago - but if it was it prob wouldve been

what if somebody had invented the steamcar it would've been incredible

news 4 u bro http://grab.by/8bcT

mind is blown by stanley steamer

has anybody invented steampunk yet, could be revolutionary

1891: The Year Steampunk Broke

get in on the ground floor of that 4 sure

wait pomplamoose opened for the dresden dolls on NYE

ILX is melting

what a world what a world etc

Could Geocities have succeeded? I never really looked at it back then so I don't know how "social" it was, but it seems like it was a similar idea. And I think they were the largest of that type. Did getting bought by Yahoo kill it?

geocities did succeed, if you mesure success like i do by number of night sky background images rendered

number of webrings belonged to

The popup ad killed geocities iirc

Lex, Internet culture was mostly people who had been "authenticated," in a way. It was BBS culture and commercial on-line systems culture that brought anonymity and handles to the Internet world, for the most part.

I think I just found out my aunt died...c/o Facebook. I can't get a confirmation on this, though. :/

IMO you should call your loved ones to inform them of such things, and then once they've all heard it IRL, then post it on facebook. Bcz it just feels fake and weird finding it out that way.

My boss is very proud that Ari Up's husband heard about her death via his (my bosses) facebook post on it.

The worst one I ever got was a gmail, where the subject about a friend of mine and the first sentence was visible:

M--- E--------?: You probably already know this but M--- was killed in an accident today.

And no, I didn't already know about it.

There's no good way of finding out stuff, sometimes.

A friend's Facebook account disappeared. That's how I found out he had died. Better than getting a group email though.

1891: The Year Steampunk Broke

― Cunga, Monday, January 3, 2011 3:15 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

LOL I'm quoting you.

Last night I found out my cousin's character-actor grandfather died via an RSS feed. (sandwiched between, like, news about the pilot season and box office speculation)

Let's hear it for technology!

Bill Irwin?

Yeah. I always enjoyed watching him pop up on shows or, now that i think about it, John Hughes movies, and he seemed like he was playing "the old man" on sitcoms for about thirty years. Like an IRL Grandpa Simpson he seemed to have been a certain kind of old forever.

bill irwin died??

"The Regard of Flight" was a family favorite taped-off-PBS VHS tape.

RIP dude, you taught me the word "proscenium."

Dry your eyes.

Bill Erwin, Abbott. As in old man who snores next to John Candy in Planes, Trains and Automobiles; and lets Catherine O'Hara have their plane ticket in Home Alone.

OK.

First GIS result for him:

http://www.daxgraphs.co.uk/star%20trek%20tng/bill%20erwin.jpg

I helped my mom set-up her FB account over the holidays, and today, while she was giving me the list of people she "doesn't want looking at her FB" she ran into some trouble using the site and asked if I had a phone number for FB -- presumably so we could take the issue to Zuckerbro himself.

A lot of Facebook's problems could have been solved long ago if that phone number were available imo (esp: available to mothers)

Although I imagine some variation of "My son -- my own teenage son -- is refusing to accept my friend requests. Do you want to talk to him on the phone about what it means to respect your own mother?" would make up 70% of the calls from moms.

I set up my mom's account on the sole condition that neither she nor any of the rest of the extended family would try to friend me.

The other 30% would be:
"I'm trying to send a letter to my dear friend June from Palo Alto, she's sick you know...I type out my letter but every time I hit send there's no send button it says 'search'. How can I make it send? This thing is just so stupid I don't know who designed it."

My mum is passively aggressively resisiting Facebook, she's mad that my brother, sister and I all talk to each other behind her back.

http://images.icanhascheezburger.com/completestore/2009/1/1/128753557474209744.jpg

my parents have no idea how to use it. they both have like 10 friends, but they are befuddled by how to upload pictures, or fill in their information, or do pretty much anything.

in other words, they don't know how to use the internet.

It is not a small blessing that my mom hates social media.

Although at this point I'd be hard pressed to identify anything beyond Fox as liked-by-my mom.

i love when i see one of my aunts post a status update that's obviously intended as a comment/post to a specific person:

"Oh Sweetie! look how cute that is-- can't wait to see you next month!!"