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Going Viral 2.0: Facing Facebook and Whatever Comes Next
August 10, 2008

All right, already, I'm adopting, I'm adopting! I started out with 3 friends on Facebook and now I have 17.  Better late than never, I guess.  But truth be told, I’m really not feelin’ it.  Obviously it’s working for millions of other people, but I’m having trouble seeing the point.  I don’t know what to do with all of the superfluous information.  It bogs me down.  As it is now, I keep deleting all of my feeds because I just can’t get my head around why anyone would care what I was doing “68 hours ago,” whether I update the name of my school or “add a photo," and why that warrants any kind of “notification.”  I suppose for lots of people, it’s a process to figure out how best to link into something as infinite as the universe itself.  Admittedly, I’m not there yet. 

However, I am getting closer.  After having breakfast earlier in the week with Dan Blank, who is the Director of Content Strategy & Development at Reed Business Interactive (the company for which I write this blog), I realized that part of the problem is that I don’t fully appreciate the capacity of Facebook specifically, and its relationship to the Internet as a whole in general.  Why?  Because I don’t understand it.  It’s not that I don’t understand what the Internet is, as much as it is that I don’t know what goes on in the "big black hole" that makes up the "back end" of the World Wide Web.  And without that knowledge, it’s impossible to envision the possibilities. 
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Our conversation actually began because I had read one of Dan’s blog entries about “How Facebook Changed His Life,” and I loved it.  To some extent, it opened my eyes about some of the possibilities, but I still couldn’t relate to its fundamental purpose via Dan’s experience.  Perhaps that was simply because I couldn’t relate to connecting with anyone from grammar school, as he had.  But in concept and theory I began thinking about the way a one-dimensional interface can not only connect people to one another, but also about the way that it can connect technologies to galvanize a force and propel momentum unmatched by any one person, relationship, event or thing.  Yes, yes, I know it's called "going viral," but beyond it happening accidentally, which is often the case, it is daunting the think about how and if it can be strategically forced.

And so things began making sense to me a little more.  I saw that it’s not just about adding friends, being friends, finding friends, updating friends, requesting friends, poking friends, whatever…but rather about the relationships between people (on and offline) and the relationships between technologies.  Used together, both will further individual, group and personal objectives on a scale unknown to anyone before now.  Now that, I can see serving a valuable purpose. 

So if all goes well, I predict that people like Dan will become our next generation of accountants and attorneys, because it is simply too vast a cyber-universe for "laymen" like myself to navigate alone. 

Posted by Donna Flagg on August 10, 2008 | Comments (0)