Who Benefits?

Bryce Roberts, For Whom Is This Service Built?

As I absorbed the new messaging around Facebook as the place to tell the stories of our lives I couldn’t help but be reminded of a post Fred wrote when Google launched their Facebook killer. In it, Fred surfaced a question he had when looking at why Google was requiring use of “real names” as a condition of Google+:

It begs the question of whom Google built this service for? You or them. And the answer to why you need to use your real name in the service is because they need you to. Well at least we got that out there and can deal with it.

I had the same feeling looking at the new Facebook- for whom were these new features built?

Does all of this new structure make my experience more engaging? Or does the added structure make my experience easier to index? Does the connection to my past posts inspire me to add more chapters of my life’s story? Or does it remind me of how much of my personal information Facebook owns to make me rethink leaving for other service? Is Facebook really interested in helping me tell the story of my own life? Or are they more interested in having me help them tell the story of my life to their app developers, partners and advertisers?

We are onto Facebook, but the average person doesn’t care.

I am a philosopher: I am interested in broad answers to general questions. Most people are living in a more constrained way, looking for simple answers to narrow questions. Facebook works in that context.

Facebook will be blindsided by tectonic technology shifts, not an exposé of how and why the Open Graph is designed to ransack our lives, stealing every quarter from the back of the sofa and milking every episode of our online lives for royalties.

I just hope that social operating systems come soon, and Facebook is caught wrong-footed.

21 Notes/ Hide

  1. bhaktitalreja reblogged this from emergentfutures
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  6. let5ch said: It’s almost disconcerting, this tug I felt when I got early access to see how my new profile looks when using Timeline. My timeline stretches back to my birthdate, showing decades of empty space that I almost NEED to fill with milestones. Mindgames.
  7. ballahalla reblogged this from stoweboyd
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