Let's Give 'Em Something to Talk About

Mark Zuckerburg has been named Time Magazine's "Person of the Year," and I for one am not surprised, although admittedly i'm probably not his biggest fan. I believe that Zuckerburg has exhibited a tremendous potential for turning his billion dollar network into something more than a simple online yearbook, and yet much of my hope for what his web of data might hold has yet to be realized.

A few weeks ago, I left Facebook, not so much in rebellion as to see what life would be like without it and to discern what kinds of boundaries I needed to develop for using it thoughtfully. After beginning a book by Nicholas Carr entitled "The Shallows," about which i'll post another piece sometime soon, I determined that I needed some space to take a breather and define myself outside the social web. The conclusions of my experiment thus far have been remarkable in many ways. More or less, I don't miss Facebook all that much, and I also find that a lack of Facebook has not changed my ability to connect with the people that I care about. Equally surprising, though, what I do miss about Facebook is the ease with which I could share and catalogue links/snippets of interesting information. Admittedly my interaction with this aspect of Facebook was likely enhanced by my large "like" list which enabled me to track new content from all web sources of interest in a single portal. This was a real value as it often led me to useful links and helped me stay up-to-date on things like concerts by my favorite bands, new content from my favorite design companies, and readings of interest from my favorite online mags. However, today the algorithm is imperfect at best. I still have to filter through so much unwanted content to get to the stuff that is really of interest that the quest almost seems ridiculous. This, to me, is the incongruity that exists in the Facebook world at present: too much fluff.

Zuckerburg has gotten closer to the ideal in the very recent past, but I think he has quite a ways to go, and I'm not yet convinced he has the staff or futuristic know-how to pull it off. As MIT's Neil Gershenfeld (When Things Start to Think) said something to the effect of years ago, the web (or in this case, Facebook) hasn't exactly lived up to its full potential. Given the power of his network and his prestigious new title, the question of the moment is: has Zuckerburg lived up to his full potential?