【明報專訊】GeneTree及ancestry.com除了可助人揭開身世之謎，更是好玩的社交網站，它們糅合流行社交網站Facebook、MySpace及影片分享網站YouTube 的功能，讓會員隨時與親友網上團聚。
會員可在網站免費上載個人的族譜、照片和影片等，與親友聯絡。GeneTree行政總裁索倫森說：「這是一個家族歷史分享網站，利用基因擴充家庭的概念，讓人們與家人及遠親保持聯繫。」
該網站十分注重私隱，嚴禁會員強行認親認戚。以GeneTree為例，會員在搜尋時，網站不會提供近100年內出生的個別人士姓名。會員必須聯絡GeneTree，由網站徵求對方同意後，才可取得對方姓名及身世資料。
美聯社
2007年10月23日 星期二
2007年10月15日 星期一
The Future of Facebook
Tuesday, Jul. 17, 2007
The Future of Facebook
By Laura Locke
In his first interview with TIME, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sat down with reporter Laura Locke to talk about Facebook's rapid growth spurt, IPO rumors, future plans and the pressures of being a 23-year-old CEO in Silicon Valley.
TIME: Facebook is undergoing a huge period of growth. With more than 150,000 new users signing up daily, it is growing three times as fast as rival MySpace. What do you attribute that spike to?
Zuckerberg: For a while we actually constrained our growth. We made it so that only people in college could sign up. Initially it was only available to people at Harvard, where I was at college. We rolled it out to all the colleges, all the high schools, then a bunch of companies could sign up, and now everyone can sign up. It may seem like the growth is really accelerating at a crazy rate, but it's actually been growing and doubling about once every six months for quite a while.
TIME: Is Facebook's popularity connected to its focus on authenticity? On your site, misrepresentation of your real self is a violation of company policy.
Zuckerberg: That's the critical part of it. Our whole theory is that people have real connections in the world. People communicate most naturally and effectively with their friends and the people around them. What we figured is that if we could model what those connections were, [we could] provide that information to a set of applications through which people want to share information, photos or videos or events. But that only works if those relationships are real. That's a really big difference between Facebook and a lot of other sites. We're not thinking about ourselves as a community — we're not trying to build a community — we're not trying to make new connections.
TIME: Why do you describe Facebook as a "social utility" rather than a "social network?"
Zuckerberg: I think there's confusion around what the point of social networks is. A lot of different companies characterized as social networks have different goals — some serve the function of business networking, some are media portals. What we're trying to do is just make it really efficient for people to communicate, get information and share information. We always try to emphasize the utility component.
TIME: In September you rebuffed Yahoo's offer to buy Facebook for nearly $1 billion. Before that, Viacom put up a $750 million bid. And about two months ago you clearly said Facebook would stay independent. Is that still the plan?
Zuckerberg: That has always been the plan. As a company we're very focused on what we're building and not as focused on the exit. We just believe that we're adding a certain amount of value to people's lives if we build a very good product. That's the reason why more than half of our users use the product every day — it's a more efficient way for them to communicate with their friends and get information about the people around them than anything else they can do. We're not really looking to sell the company. We're not looking to IPO anytime soon. It's just not the core focus of the company.
TIME: So, if Facebook isn't for sale and there's no IPO in the works, how do you intend to satisfy your investors who put a total of $38 million into the company?
Zuckerberg: Well, they're actually really supportive of this. What they want is to build a really great company, too. And if you think about the timeframe over which this has happened — we took our venture round from Accel Partners just about two years ago — they're not in a rush. We have plenty of time to build something good.
TIME: Facebook is looking to hire a stock administrator, isn't that a signal you're preparing for an IPO?
Zuckerberg: Well, no. [Pause.] I mean, we grant options to all of our employees. At this point we have more than 250. It's a core part of compensation, so you want to make sure you get it right for people. At some point in the future, if we get a chance to go down that [IPO] path, it will be valuable to have that — it's a part of building out the company. I think it's funny that people are paying so much attention to that.
TIME: The frenzy surrounding Facebook seems to have intensified quite dramatically over the past several months. What do you think is behind the company's newfound cachet?
Zuckerberg: I think the most recent surge, at least in the press, is around the launch of Facebook Platform. For the first time we're allowing developers who don't work at Facebook to develop applications just as if they were. That's a big deal because it means that all developers have a new way of doing business if they choose to take advantage of it. There are whole companies that are forming whose only product is a Facebook Platform application. That provides an opportunity for them, it provides an opportunity for people who want to make money by investing in those companies, and I think that's something that's pretty exciting to the business community. It's also really exciting to our users because it means that a whole new variety of services are going to be made available.
TIME: What's your grand plan for the company? How do you see it evolving over the next three to five years?
Zuckerberg: It's tough to say, exactly, what things will look like in three to five years, but there's a lot of work to do in just moving along the path that we've already set out. Right now we have 30 million active users on Facebook. There's a lot more to go. And there a lot of different applications that are going to be developed to allow people to share information in different ways. I would expect the user base will grow [and there will be] more ways for advertisers to reach people and communicate in a very natural way, just like users communicate with each other. All these things will just get more and more evolved.
TIME: Beyond Facebook's exclusive advertising deal with Microsoft, which gives the software giant the right to sell ads on the site, what are some of your ideas about monetizing your 30 million users?
Zuckerberg: Advertising works most effectively when it's in line with what people are already trying to do. And people are trying to communicate in a certain way on Facebook — they share information with their friends, they learn about what their friends are doing —so there's really a whole new opportunity for a new type of advertising model within that. And I think we'll see more in the next couple months or years on that.
TIME: With more than 40 billion page views every month, Facebook is the sixth most trafficked site in the U.S., and the top photo-sharing site. What are your international expansion plans?
Zuckerberg: Right now a lot of our growth is happening internationally. We have more than 10% or 15% of the population of Canada on the site. The U.K. has a huge user base. We haven't translated the site yet, but that's something we're working on and it should be done soon. What we're doing is pretty broadly applicable to people in all different age groups and demographics and places around the world.
TIME: You recently took off for a summer vacation, what did you do?
Zuckerberg: Hang out with my family.
TIME: What's a typical day like for the guy who founded Facebook in his Harvard dorm room just three years ago before becoming a full-time entrepreneur?
Zuckerberg: I wake up in the morning, I walk to work because I live four blocks from one of our offices, and I work, meet with people, and discuss things all day, and then I go home and go to sleep. I don't have an alarm clock. If someone needs to wake me up, then I have my BlackBerry next to me.
TIME: You're a 23-year-old Silicon Valley CEO. How do you deal with all pressures that come along with running a hyper-fast paced, high-profile technology company?
Zuckerberg: I was watching an interview with Steve Jobs the other day, in which he said that 'In order to be doing something like this, you have to really, really like what you're doing, because otherwise it just doesn't make sense.' The demands and the amount of work that it takes to put something like [Facebook] into place, it's just so much that if you weren't completely into what you were doing and you didn't think it was an important thing, then it would be irrational to spend that much time on it. Part of the reason why this is fun is because we've managed to build a team of really smart people who come from different backgrounds and have different experiences and think in different ways. People constantly try to put us in a bucket: are we trying to sell the company? What are we trying to do? What is the business strategy? People are often more interested in why we're hiring a stock-options administrator. Whereas for me and a lot of people around me, that's not really what we focus on. We're just focused on building things.
Click to Print
Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1644040,00.html
The Future of Facebook
By Laura Locke
In his first interview with TIME, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sat down with reporter Laura Locke to talk about Facebook's rapid growth spurt, IPO rumors, future plans and the pressures of being a 23-year-old CEO in Silicon Valley.
TIME: Facebook is undergoing a huge period of growth. With more than 150,000 new users signing up daily, it is growing three times as fast as rival MySpace. What do you attribute that spike to?
Zuckerberg: For a while we actually constrained our growth. We made it so that only people in college could sign up. Initially it was only available to people at Harvard, where I was at college. We rolled it out to all the colleges, all the high schools, then a bunch of companies could sign up, and now everyone can sign up. It may seem like the growth is really accelerating at a crazy rate, but it's actually been growing and doubling about once every six months for quite a while.
TIME: Is Facebook's popularity connected to its focus on authenticity? On your site, misrepresentation of your real self is a violation of company policy.
Zuckerberg: That's the critical part of it. Our whole theory is that people have real connections in the world. People communicate most naturally and effectively with their friends and the people around them. What we figured is that if we could model what those connections were, [we could] provide that information to a set of applications through which people want to share information, photos or videos or events. But that only works if those relationships are real. That's a really big difference between Facebook and a lot of other sites. We're not thinking about ourselves as a community — we're not trying to build a community — we're not trying to make new connections.
TIME: Why do you describe Facebook as a "social utility" rather than a "social network?"
Zuckerberg: I think there's confusion around what the point of social networks is. A lot of different companies characterized as social networks have different goals — some serve the function of business networking, some are media portals. What we're trying to do is just make it really efficient for people to communicate, get information and share information. We always try to emphasize the utility component.
TIME: In September you rebuffed Yahoo's offer to buy Facebook for nearly $1 billion. Before that, Viacom put up a $750 million bid. And about two months ago you clearly said Facebook would stay independent. Is that still the plan?
Zuckerberg: That has always been the plan. As a company we're very focused on what we're building and not as focused on the exit. We just believe that we're adding a certain amount of value to people's lives if we build a very good product. That's the reason why more than half of our users use the product every day — it's a more efficient way for them to communicate with their friends and get information about the people around them than anything else they can do. We're not really looking to sell the company. We're not looking to IPO anytime soon. It's just not the core focus of the company.
TIME: So, if Facebook isn't for sale and there's no IPO in the works, how do you intend to satisfy your investors who put a total of $38 million into the company?
Zuckerberg: Well, they're actually really supportive of this. What they want is to build a really great company, too. And if you think about the timeframe over which this has happened — we took our venture round from Accel Partners just about two years ago — they're not in a rush. We have plenty of time to build something good.
TIME: Facebook is looking to hire a stock administrator, isn't that a signal you're preparing for an IPO?
Zuckerberg: Well, no. [Pause.] I mean, we grant options to all of our employees. At this point we have more than 250. It's a core part of compensation, so you want to make sure you get it right for people. At some point in the future, if we get a chance to go down that [IPO] path, it will be valuable to have that — it's a part of building out the company. I think it's funny that people are paying so much attention to that.
TIME: The frenzy surrounding Facebook seems to have intensified quite dramatically over the past several months. What do you think is behind the company's newfound cachet?
Zuckerberg: I think the most recent surge, at least in the press, is around the launch of Facebook Platform. For the first time we're allowing developers who don't work at Facebook to develop applications just as if they were. That's a big deal because it means that all developers have a new way of doing business if they choose to take advantage of it. There are whole companies that are forming whose only product is a Facebook Platform application. That provides an opportunity for them, it provides an opportunity for people who want to make money by investing in those companies, and I think that's something that's pretty exciting to the business community. It's also really exciting to our users because it means that a whole new variety of services are going to be made available.
TIME: What's your grand plan for the company? How do you see it evolving over the next three to five years?
Zuckerberg: It's tough to say, exactly, what things will look like in three to five years, but there's a lot of work to do in just moving along the path that we've already set out. Right now we have 30 million active users on Facebook. There's a lot more to go. And there a lot of different applications that are going to be developed to allow people to share information in different ways. I would expect the user base will grow [and there will be] more ways for advertisers to reach people and communicate in a very natural way, just like users communicate with each other. All these things will just get more and more evolved.
TIME: Beyond Facebook's exclusive advertising deal with Microsoft, which gives the software giant the right to sell ads on the site, what are some of your ideas about monetizing your 30 million users?
Zuckerberg: Advertising works most effectively when it's in line with what people are already trying to do. And people are trying to communicate in a certain way on Facebook — they share information with their friends, they learn about what their friends are doing —so there's really a whole new opportunity for a new type of advertising model within that. And I think we'll see more in the next couple months or years on that.
TIME: With more than 40 billion page views every month, Facebook is the sixth most trafficked site in the U.S., and the top photo-sharing site. What are your international expansion plans?
Zuckerberg: Right now a lot of our growth is happening internationally. We have more than 10% or 15% of the population of Canada on the site. The U.K. has a huge user base. We haven't translated the site yet, but that's something we're working on and it should be done soon. What we're doing is pretty broadly applicable to people in all different age groups and demographics and places around the world.
TIME: You recently took off for a summer vacation, what did you do?
Zuckerberg: Hang out with my family.
TIME: What's a typical day like for the guy who founded Facebook in his Harvard dorm room just three years ago before becoming a full-time entrepreneur?
Zuckerberg: I wake up in the morning, I walk to work because I live four blocks from one of our offices, and I work, meet with people, and discuss things all day, and then I go home and go to sleep. I don't have an alarm clock. If someone needs to wake me up, then I have my BlackBerry next to me.
TIME: You're a 23-year-old Silicon Valley CEO. How do you deal with all pressures that come along with running a hyper-fast paced, high-profile technology company?
Zuckerberg: I was watching an interview with Steve Jobs the other day, in which he said that 'In order to be doing something like this, you have to really, really like what you're doing, because otherwise it just doesn't make sense.' The demands and the amount of work that it takes to put something like [Facebook] into place, it's just so much that if you weren't completely into what you were doing and you didn't think it was an important thing, then it would be irrational to spend that much time on it. Part of the reason why this is fun is because we've managed to build a team of really smart people who come from different backgrounds and have different experiences and think in different ways. People constantly try to put us in a bucket: are we trying to sell the company? What are we trying to do? What is the business strategy? People are often more interested in why we're hiring a stock-options administrator. Whereas for me and a lot of people around me, that's not really what we focus on. We're just focused on building things.
Click to Print
Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1644040,00.html
TIMES:Facebook and the Election
Monday, Jul. 10, 2006
Facebook and the Election
By Tracy Samantha Schmidt
In the '90s, the message was "Rock the Vote." Now it's time to "Facebook" it. Starting in September, politicians will be able to buy ad space on networking site Facebook.com, allowing them to create profiles viewable to 8 million members. That should help pols court a group of voters who are hard to reach. Facebookers will be able to "friend" any candidate they like--linking to a profile as they would a classmate's. Facebook says politicians won't pay anything near the tens of thousands of dollars that corporate advertisers do to set up on the site. Politicians should log on, says Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos politiblog, because young people "hang out in places like ... Facebook and MySpace," which plans a similar initiative. They're the new town square--great for any candidate who can figure out the online equivalent of a handshake.
Facebook and the Election
By Tracy Samantha Schmidt
In the '90s, the message was "Rock the Vote." Now it's time to "Facebook" it. Starting in September, politicians will be able to buy ad space on networking site Facebook.com, allowing them to create profiles viewable to 8 million members. That should help pols court a group of voters who are hard to reach. Facebookers will be able to "friend" any candidate they like--linking to a profile as they would a classmate's. Facebook says politicians won't pay anything near the tens of thousands of dollars that corporate advertisers do to set up on the site. Politicians should log on, says Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos politiblog, because young people "hang out in places like ... Facebook and MySpace," which plans a similar initiative. They're the new town square--great for any candidate who can figure out the online equivalent of a handshake.
Facebook Subpoenaed in Sex Probe
Monday, Sep. 24, 2007 By MICHAEL GORMLEY/AP
不知是不是可以講下Facebook無視傳票似乎更確立了它的「ivy kids」想像。[見面可詳]
(ALBANY, N.Y.) — The New York Attorney General has subpoenaed Facebook after the company did not respond to "many" complaints by investigators who were solicited for sex while posing as teenagers on the social-networking site.
State investigators, who set up profiles as 12- to 14-year olds, said they were quickly contacted by other Facebook users with comments such as "u look too hot....... can i c u online," "do you like sex?" and "call me if u want to do sex with me."
Investigators said that when they wrote to Facebook about their experiences, the concerns were ignored "many" times.
"My office is concerned that Facebook's promise of a safe Web site is not consistent with its performance in policing its site and responding to complaints," said Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. "Parents have a right to know what their children will encounter on a Web site that is aggressively marketed as safe."
On Monday, he publicly released a letter to Facebook about its safety claims. Those concerns are based on several "undercover tests" in recent weeks, he said.
The subpoenas seek complaints made to the company and copies of its policies. Cuomo said the investigation is still in its early stages.
Privately held Facebook did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment.
不知是不是可以講下Facebook無視傳票似乎更確立了它的「ivy kids」想像。[見面可詳]
(ALBANY, N.Y.) — The New York Attorney General has subpoenaed Facebook after the company did not respond to "many" complaints by investigators who were solicited for sex while posing as teenagers on the social-networking site.
State investigators, who set up profiles as 12- to 14-year olds, said they were quickly contacted by other Facebook users with comments such as "u look too hot....... can i c u online," "do you like sex?" and "call me if u want to do sex with me."
Investigators said that when they wrote to Facebook about their experiences, the concerns were ignored "many" times.
"My office is concerned that Facebook's promise of a safe Web site is not consistent with its performance in policing its site and responding to complaints," said Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. "Parents have a right to know what their children will encounter on a Web site that is aggressively marketed as safe."
On Monday, he publicly released a letter to Facebook about its safety claims. Those concerns are based on several "undercover tests" in recent weeks, he said.
The subpoenas seek complaints made to the company and copies of its policies. Cuomo said the investigation is still in its early stages.
Privately held Facebook did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment.
You Are Not My Friend
You Are Not My Friend
Thursday, Oct. 04, 2007 By JOEL STEIN
In the pre-internet days, neither of us would have even thought of calling each other friends. We'd have called ourselves friends of friends who met once and yet, for some reason, kept sending each other grammatically challenged, inappropriately flirty letters with photos of ourselves attached. Police might have gotten involved.
But now we're definitively friends, having taken a public vow of friendship on friend-based websites, wearing metaphorical friendship bracelets on the earnest Facebook, the punky MySpace, the careerist LinkedIn and the suddenly very Asian Friendster. As if that wasn't enough friendship for you, some of you have also asked me to be friends on the nerdy Twitter, the dorky-élitist Doostang and the Eurotrashy hi5. You message me and comment about me and write on my walls and dedicate songs to me and invite me to join groups. More than once you have taken it upon yourself to poke me.
This is hard to say to a friend, but our relationship is starting to take up too much of my time. It's weird that I know more about you than I do about actual friends I hang out with in person--whom I propose we distinguish by calling "non-metafriends." In fact, I know more about you than I know about myself. I have no idea what my favorite movie or song or TV show is. Last I checked, they all involved Muppets.
Also, you're a bit aggressive in our friendship. Would a non-metafriend call me up and say, "Hey! Guess what? I have a bunch of new pictures of me"? Or tell me he'd colored in a map of all the places he'd ever been? Or inform me, as Michael Hirschorn did in his Facebook status update, that he "is not making decisions; he's making surprises"? It's as if I suddenly met a new group of people who were all in the special classes.
The horror is, I can't opt out. Just as I can't stop making money or my non-metafriends will have more stuff than I do, I can't stop running up my tally of MySpace friends or I'll look like a loser. Just as money made wealth quantifiable, social networks have provided a metric for popularity. We all, oddly, slot in at a specific ranking somewhere below Dane Cook.
I'm sure social networks serve many important functions that improve our lives, like reconnecting us with old friends and finding out if people we used to date are still good-looking. And social networks all have messaging functions, which would be an excellent way to send information if no one had invented e-mail.
But really, these sites aren't about connecting and reconnecting. They're a platform for self-branding. Old people are always worrying that our blogging and personal websites and MySpace profiles are taking away our privacy, but they clearly don't understand the word privacy. We're not sharing things we don't want other people to know. We're showing you our best posed, retouched photos. We're listing the Pynchon books we want you to think we've read all the way through. We're allowing other people to write whatever they want about us on our walls, unless we don't like it, in which case we just erase it. If we had that much privacy in real life, the bathrooms at that Minnesota airport would be empty.
And like the abrasively direct ads for tinctures and cleaning products at the beginning of the advertising age, our self-branding is none too subtle. We are a blunt lot, in our bikinis and our demands that our friends go right now to check out our blog postings. We've gone 40 years back, to sales tactics predating irony, self-deprecation and actual modesty. We are, as a social network, all so awesome that we will soon not be able to type the number 1, because we will have worn out the exclamation point that shares its key.
Until we can build some kind of social network where we can present our true, flawed selves--perhaps some genius can invent something that takes place in a house over dinner with wine--I say we strip down our online communities to just the important parts. With enough venture funding--by which I mean the volunteer services of a dude who knows how to build a website--I hope to launch TrueSocialStatus.com on which users are allowed to submit only their name, their occupation, a photo, the square footage of their home and a list of any celebrities they happen to know. Then other people can vote, on a scale of 1 to 100, on how awesome they are. At the end of the year, the ones with the most points are made homecoming king and queen, which, if I remember correctly, should immediately send their scores plummeting. If nothing else, it should finally rid us of Tila Tequila.
TIMES: Why Facebook Is the Future
Thursday, Aug. 23, 2007 By LEV GROSSMAN
Thursday, Aug. 23, 2007
Why Facebook Is the Future
By Lev Grossman
On Aug. 14 a computer hacker named Virgil Griffith unleashed a clever little program onto the Internet that he dubbed WikiScanner. It's a simple application that trolls through the records of Wikipedia, the publicly editable Web-based encyclopedia, and checks on who is making changes to which entries. Sometimes it's people who shouldn't be. For example, WikiScanner turned up evidence that somebody from Wal-Mart had punched up Wal-Mart's Wikipedia entry. Bad retail giant.
WikiScanner is a jolly little game of Internet gotcha, but it's really about something more: a growing popular irritation with the Internet in general. The Net has anarchy in its DNA; it's always been about anonymity, playing with your own identity and messing with other people's heads. The idea, such as it was, seems to have been that the Internet would free us of the burden of our public identities so we could be our true, authentic selves online. Except it turns out--who could've seen this coming?--that our true, authentic selves aren't that fantastic. The great experiment proved that some of us are wonderful and interesting but that a lot of us are hackers and pranksters and hucksters. Which is one way of explaining the extraordinary appeal of Facebook.
Facebook is, in Silicon Vall--ese, a "social network": a website for keeping track of your friends and sending them messages and sharing photos and doing all those other things that a good little Web 2.0 company is supposed to help you do. It was started by Harvard students in 2004 as a tool for meeting-- or at least discreetly ogling--other Harvard students, and it still has a reputation as a hangout for teenagers and the teenaged-at-heart. Which is ironic because Facebook is really about making the Web grow up.
Whereas Google is a brilliant technological hack, Facebook is primarily a feat of social engineering. (It wouldn't be a bad idea for Google to acquire Facebook, the way it snaffled YouTube, but it's almost certainly too late in the day for that. Yahoo! offered a billion for Facebook last year and was rebuffed.) Facebook's appeal is both obvious and rather subtle. It's a website, but in a sense, it's another version of the Internet itself: a Net within the Net, one that's everything the larger Net is not. Facebook is cleanly designed and has a classy, upmarket feel to it--a whiff of the Ivy League still clings. People tend to use their real names on Facebook. They also declare their sex, age, whereabouts, romantic status and institutional affiliations. Identity is not a performance or a toy on Facebook; it is a fixed and orderly fact. Nobody does anything secretly: a news feed constantly updates your friends on your activities. On Facebook, everybody knows you're a dog.
Maybe that's why Facebook's fastest-growing demographic consists of people 35 or older: they're refugees from the uncouth wider Web. Every community must negotiate the imperatives of individual freedom and collective social order, and Facebook constitutes a critical rebalancing of the Internet's founding vision of unfettered electronic liberty. Of course, it is possible to misbehave on Facebook--it's just self-defeating. Unlike the Internet, Facebook is structured around an opt-in philosophy; people have to consent to have contact with or even see others on the network. If you're annoying folks, you'll essentially cease to exist, as those you annoy drop you off the grid.
Facebook has taken steps this year to expand its functionality by allowing outside developers to create applications that integrate with its pages, which brings with it expanded opportunities for abuse. (No doubt Griffith is hard at work on FacebookScanner.) But it has also hung on doggedly to its core insight: that the most important function of a social network is connecting people and that its second most important function is keeping them apart.
Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1655722,00.html
Thursday, Aug. 23, 2007
Why Facebook Is the Future
By Lev Grossman
On Aug. 14 a computer hacker named Virgil Griffith unleashed a clever little program onto the Internet that he dubbed WikiScanner. It's a simple application that trolls through the records of Wikipedia, the publicly editable Web-based encyclopedia, and checks on who is making changes to which entries. Sometimes it's people who shouldn't be. For example, WikiScanner turned up evidence that somebody from Wal-Mart had punched up Wal-Mart's Wikipedia entry. Bad retail giant.
WikiScanner is a jolly little game of Internet gotcha, but it's really about something more: a growing popular irritation with the Internet in general. The Net has anarchy in its DNA; it's always been about anonymity, playing with your own identity and messing with other people's heads. The idea, such as it was, seems to have been that the Internet would free us of the burden of our public identities so we could be our true, authentic selves online. Except it turns out--who could've seen this coming?--that our true, authentic selves aren't that fantastic. The great experiment proved that some of us are wonderful and interesting but that a lot of us are hackers and pranksters and hucksters. Which is one way of explaining the extraordinary appeal of Facebook.
Facebook is, in Silicon Vall--ese, a "social network": a website for keeping track of your friends and sending them messages and sharing photos and doing all those other things that a good little Web 2.0 company is supposed to help you do. It was started by Harvard students in 2004 as a tool for meeting-- or at least discreetly ogling--other Harvard students, and it still has a reputation as a hangout for teenagers and the teenaged-at-heart. Which is ironic because Facebook is really about making the Web grow up.
Whereas Google is a brilliant technological hack, Facebook is primarily a feat of social engineering. (It wouldn't be a bad idea for Google to acquire Facebook, the way it snaffled YouTube, but it's almost certainly too late in the day for that. Yahoo! offered a billion for Facebook last year and was rebuffed.) Facebook's appeal is both obvious and rather subtle. It's a website, but in a sense, it's another version of the Internet itself: a Net within the Net, one that's everything the larger Net is not. Facebook is cleanly designed and has a classy, upmarket feel to it--a whiff of the Ivy League still clings. People tend to use their real names on Facebook. They also declare their sex, age, whereabouts, romantic status and institutional affiliations. Identity is not a performance or a toy on Facebook; it is a fixed and orderly fact. Nobody does anything secretly: a news feed constantly updates your friends on your activities. On Facebook, everybody knows you're a dog.
Maybe that's why Facebook's fastest-growing demographic consists of people 35 or older: they're refugees from the uncouth wider Web. Every community must negotiate the imperatives of individual freedom and collective social order, and Facebook constitutes a critical rebalancing of the Internet's founding vision of unfettered electronic liberty. Of course, it is possible to misbehave on Facebook--it's just self-defeating. Unlike the Internet, Facebook is structured around an opt-in philosophy; people have to consent to have contact with or even see others on the network. If you're annoying folks, you'll essentially cease to exist, as those you annoy drop you off the grid.
Facebook has taken steps this year to expand its functionality by allowing outside developers to create applications that integrate with its pages, which brings with it expanded opportunities for abuse. (No doubt Griffith is hard at work on FacebookScanner.) But it has also hung on doggedly to its core insight: that the most important function of a social network is connecting people and that its second most important function is keeping them apart.
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逃避Facebook
明報 D07 時代 女人心 By 陳惜姿
2007-09-27
以前一有人邀請我加入他們的Facebook，我一定像逃避病毒一樣，即時除那信息，永不回應，像個孤獨精。
我拒絕的大都是我的學生，我常說，我一年教八十多人，學期完了人人都跟我做朋友，我豈不是疲於奔命？而我一向認為，Facebook 內那些公諸同好的片言隻語，根本就談不上什麼友情，最多告訴人我還活而已。星期日一起吃頓午飯，到朋友家玩一個下午，才是我享受的友情。
直至最近，連一些和我年紀相近，學問又比我大很多的朋友都邀請我加入這遊戲，我才深切反省：我是不是太老套？太追不上時代？
我嘗試過「深入虎穴」，一步一步入去，一要我上載相片，我就猶豫了，為什麼呢？
然後有學生忠告我，不要胡亂加入。若我成為其中一分子，以後任何人有任何留言給我，都會電郵通知，我的信箱很快便被擠滿。
除了Facebook，還有各路英雄的網誌，朋友傳來他網誌地址，我循例把它加到「我的最愛」，但很少踏足。
現代人的生活為什麼可以過得充實，就是不拍拖不結婚不生兒女甚至連貓狗都不養，仍然心中富有？
他們的生活有兩部分，白天上學上班打瞌睡擠車排隊買飯盒和人吵架，活得如何齷齪不要緊。到了晚上，一旦開了電腦，有另一世界等他。我的學生常說自己徹夜沒睡，美其名是做功課，實際上一晚把自己的網誌update 三次，還時刻察看別人有什麼留言，兼要看別人的。如今還要加上Facebook，電車男也會八面玲瓏。
人老了，就覺得要應付這些東西很吃力，還是讓耳根清靜點好。
（隔兩日見報）
2007-09-27
以前一有人邀請我加入他們的Facebook，我一定像逃避病毒一樣，即時除那信息，永不回應，像個孤獨精。
我拒絕的大都是我的學生，我常說，我一年教八十多人，學期完了人人都跟我做朋友，我豈不是疲於奔命？而我一向認為，Facebook 內那些公諸同好的片言隻語，根本就談不上什麼友情，最多告訴人我還活而已。星期日一起吃頓午飯，到朋友家玩一個下午，才是我享受的友情。
直至最近，連一些和我年紀相近，學問又比我大很多的朋友都邀請我加入這遊戲，我才深切反省：我是不是太老套？太追不上時代？
我嘗試過「深入虎穴」，一步一步入去，一要我上載相片，我就猶豫了，為什麼呢？
然後有學生忠告我，不要胡亂加入。若我成為其中一分子，以後任何人有任何留言給我，都會電郵通知，我的信箱很快便被擠滿。
除了Facebook，還有各路英雄的網誌，朋友傳來他網誌地址，我循例把它加到「我的最愛」，但很少踏足。
現代人的生活為什麼可以過得充實，就是不拍拖不結婚不生兒女甚至連貓狗都不養，仍然心中富有？
他們的生活有兩部分，白天上學上班打瞌睡擠車排隊買飯盒和人吵架，活得如何齷齪不要緊。到了晚上，一旦開了電腦，有另一世界等他。我的學生常說自己徹夜沒睡，美其名是做功課，實際上一晚把自己的網誌update 三次，還時刻察看別人有什麼留言，兼要看別人的。如今還要加上Facebook，電車男也會八面玲瓏。
人老了，就覺得要應付這些東西很吃力，還是讓耳根清靜點好。
（隔兩日見報）
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