May 28th, 2007, 9 Comments »
Over at Inside the CBC, I read about the Ceeb (can I call it the Ceeb?) partnering with Facebook to launch The Great Canadian Wish List (Facebook account required).
It’s basically 43 Things with voting to celebrate Canada Day. You submit a wish for the country and get fellow Facebook users to vote it up. They’re a little too self-congratulatory when they call it “a ground-breaking experiment in civic engagement and journalistic partnership”, but it’s a good idea.
Here’s another idea: wouldn’t it be fun to get something wacky to the top of that list? It won’t be hard if we start soon. The top vote-getter only has 32 votes.
Maybe it’s because I’m not on Canadian soil anymore, but nothing great springs to mind. “I wish our prime minister would come out of the closet” is just lame. “I wish Canada would adopt the 29-hour day?” “I wish PEI would secede?” I got nothing.
You people are smart. Have you got any amusing suggestions?
UPDATE: Hmm…in the early going, the contest seems to be led by the Religious Right. The top vote-getter today is “Abolish Abortion in Canada” while #5 is a wish “For a spirtual revival in our nation”. Personally, I can really get behind “I wish the CBC would stop creating stupid youth-outreach campaigns”.
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May 25th, 2007, 9 Comments »
I really, really, really didn’t want to like Facebook. And yet it’s got its friendly, azure claws in me and I find myself going back there nearly every day. And, of course, they recently opened up their API garage and invited all the other Web apps in (hey Flickr, get on that please).
Anyway, I recently discovered that there’s a FaceBook group for SATCo, the student theatre group at UVic. Among other things, current students are trying to gather a complete production history for the company. I was part of SATCo for a few years back in university, and because I’m a big geek, I still have a bunch of files from that era. As such, I was able to contribute two year’s worth of production titles and descriptions.
An Ad Hoc Engine for Folding Time
This got me thinking about Facebook, organizations and knowledge transfer. Facebook seems to be an ad hoc engine for folding time.
Imagine the advantages of providing an online community where past, present and future members of an organization (a university faculty, a non-profit group, a company and so forth) can gather and exchange information.
To stick with my theatre example, imagine enabling a high school student in Campbell River to talk to a current UVic student, and enabling an acting student to talk to a graduate who’s now a working actor.
Fleeting Relationships
This stuff happens in the real world, but it’s rare, formalized and time-consuming. I see far more potential for informal, low impact and possibly fleeting relationships to form on a site like Facebook. Mentor programs are great, but few professionals have the time to devote to them. Those same professionals probably have 10 minutes a week to answer a question about which specialities a nursing student should consider.
Non-profits have a hard time retaining staff. Facebook might be a way for current employees to contact past ones, eliminating the endless cycle of solving recurring problems (what do you do when the fax machine breaks? Do email marketing campaigns work?).
The same advantages apply for companies. Drawing connections to the past might help keep current employees. There might be a great marketing campaign from a decade ago that might just work wonders today. Somebody might finally be able to explain that smellin the lunch room fridge.
If you’ve haven’t done so, start (or join) a Facebook group for for your company, organization or institution. Fire up the Facebook time folding engine, and connect your past with your future.
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April 29th, 2007, 13 Comments »
For the past couple of months, everybody’s been remarking on the crazy adoption of Facebook. It’s like all those MySpace kids graduated from high school, went off to college, and out-grew the social network that looks like their bedroom.
Out of a growing sense of obligation, I joined Facebook a couple of weeks ago (my meagre profile). Since then, I’ve received about 30 friend requests from people who found me. What surprised me about these was that a decent portion of them weren’t necessarily Web 2.0, alpha Web users, drinking-the-Koolaid folks. Some of them are just regular people using a tool they apparently like.
I’d deferred those requests until tonight, which was a mistake. There’s no apparent way to approve friends in bulk (what an odd phrase). You have to affirm each request one at a time.
Here’s the difficulty I have with all these generic social networks. I don’t want them to be my central point of presence–that’s what I’ve got this site for. I’m happy to have a network of loosely-joined small pieces (Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, Last.fm and so forth). However, I want them to orbit the planet that is darrenbarefoot.com, not http://www.facebook.com/p/Darren_Barefoot/570290599.
Essentially, I want sites like Facebook to be big detour signs pointing to this site. That’s obviously not what the makers of Facebook intended, so it’s a bit tricky.
Regardless, mine is an outlying use case. Most Facebook users probably want it to be their central node of web presence or (an awkward but apt phrase) ‘digital lifestyle aggregator’.
Alex has some more extensive and insightful things to say about the social networking tool du jour.
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