schmoozy space Mark Szpakowski's szpace blog

I've been enjoying being on Facebook lately. It does a clean, elegant, exciting job of putting together intersecting circles of people networks, on various scales. The key seems to be people-orientation, in whatever ways people form relationships. I pay attention to my identity, which is almost entirely made up of little communcations with other people channeled through my face and through the groups we form. It's like grooming behavior: we spend time looking through each other's fur, picking out interesting stuff... :-)

Facebook has a Status Updates feature, where I can post short msgs, all starting with, in my case, "Mark is...", as in "Mark is in short sleeves 1st time this year", and also see others' status updates. The WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) was a pioneer in this. A perpetually recreated topic in the Grateful Dead forum was a Status Report topic, where all messages were one liners starting with the user's first name or nickname. It created an ongoing sense of touch, as does Facebook and its siblings.

The page layout of Facebook, with its rectangles of RSS feeds and polyarchically owned editable content frames, gives a sense of living mosaic that I haven't felt since the days of NCSA Mosaic.