Facebook as serendipity engine
I check Facebook several times each day, each time for a minute or two. I have it on my Treo and can check it in bad traffic (yeah, yeah, I know) and enjoy how it keeps me connected or reconnects me with people as young in my acquaintance as today and as old as high school. The feed that got Facebook in such trouble in the fall of 2006 is the network’s chief appeal, and what’s great about the feed is its triviality and the fact that there are a limited number of results that I see when I log in, so I don’t feel like I have a homework assignment waiting for me.
While I admire what Mark Zuckerberg et. al. have accomplished, I think that “social graph” is a bit overweening and suffers from a disease that many technologists — particularly young technologists — have, which is the tendency to invent cloudy new words for clear old concepts.
In this case, the concept is serendipity.
The internet is terrific at getting you exactly what you want, when you want it and a good price: think Amazon.com, iTunes, RSS feeds and, more generally, search.
But the internet is terrible at exposing you to things that you didn’t know you wanted and might really enjoy: think the glum irrelevance of Amazon’s recommendations or the clutter of a search page when you don’t have a precise enough set of keywords in the search.
By contrast, real-world bookstores have all these wonderful aisles and shelves where people wander and happen upon things, and the clerks act like editors when they showcase staff picks on convenient shelves at eye level. I have a cognitive context for my local Borders; that context, not to mention that I’m in wander mode rather than hunt-and-acquire mode when I’m there, makes me more open to seeing new things. So, for example, I recently started reading a cute werewolf series that I happened to see displayed in the sci-fi/fantasy section at Borders. (The first one is “Kitty and The Midnight Hour” by Carrie Vaughn if you like this sort of thing.) So far, I don’t get that kind of serendipity at Amazon, and much as I like “Stumble Upon” you simply can’t go LOOKING for serendipity… it just happens.
That’s what I enjoy about Facebook: I see what my friends and acquaintances are up to, and because I like them enough to be friends with them their activities and interests come pre-equipped with relevance to my own activities and interests. So, it’s not purely random like much in search or the average banner ad: it’s framed (in the Goffman sense) and contextualized.
I’m not looking for a new book to read: I’m finding out what my friends are up to, and if one of them happens to mention a book, then I might be inclined to read it.
Generally, I tend not to like the Facebook applications that try to automate serendipity (I’m probably going to ditch Visual Bookshelf, for example) because that’s just another form of clutter.
People don’t need profundity every moment of their lives, and the idea of a social graph just sounds so dreary and like so much work. But serendipity? Now that’s a pearl of great pricel.
By the way, the greatest serendipity engine in the world is called “college,” so it’s no wonder that Facebook emerged from that even-more serendiptious, four-year environment.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day.
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