Millions of rain drops fell down while I’ve been playing with Drupal and Facebook apps the past days. It feels good to be able to completely plan my own time again. I’m very positive about all the opportunities arising in many places and in many different disciplines. The projects that are close to my heart are moving forward and because of my involvement in them I’ve gained so many insights and skills and I’ve met many people I now consider friends and with whom I want to keep on working.
In the next 6 months I expect more of the same. I will probably spend al lot of time traveling. Now I’m just waiting for my new light-weight tool to arrive in stores in Europe.
Sometimes I get in touch with friends I haven’t seen in a long time, but most of the time Facebook is just terribly annoying. There are the vampires and growing gifts, and many more time wasting “applications”. I also noticed that more than 50% of the requests come from less than 10% of my “friends”.
Today I went through the usual “confirm requests” and decided to check out at least the Super Wall (after tons of requests). I clicked through the sign-up process without looking, without selecting anything and no friends at all. Out of gratitude Super Wall decided to send a postcard with “how to get a boyfriend: wear slutty clothes, laugh at his jokes, put out on the first date” in my name, to all my Facebook contacts. Great. … Not.
A partly solution for these annoyances is an optional blocking of applications and requests from certain friends.
And I’m not sure how to fix the sheer abuse by the Super Wall application. Is there some kind of member feedback about applications to Facebook?
Looking for some candidate blogs to add to Planet Hospitality I stumbled upon Spurring civic engagement on Facebook, Myspace and SixDegrees.org.
For the moment, while Facebook’s Causes and Myspace’s Impact seem a welcome change in allowing some use of these networks for more civic purposes, it seems as though they’ve hobbled their tools enough and created a weak-enough attachment that we’re skeptical that a lot of civic good (beyond some fundraising) will take place. We’ll hope that the next generation of tools is significantly more powerful.
I don’t believe it’s just a matter of adding powerful tools to so-called social networks. MySpace and Facebook are mostly about connecting people in the online world. To do good however, the real world needs to change. And collecting a bunch of money for a good cause might sometimes help. Even though there are some noteworthy exceptions, I’ve read, seen and experienced enough of the NGO World to know that this will never end serious issues like hunger and poverty.
I think it becomes more interesting when the social network is the cause itself. I was made to believe that this was the case for CouchSurfing, and I worked my ass off, but unfortunately I was seriously misled. Though it won’t be the solution to all the world’s problems, I still think that real social networks have a chance of enacting serious change. My bets are on BeWelcome, more decentralized alternatives or even something radically new.
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