[download full annotated bibliography]

citation: Raynes-Goldie, K. (2011) Annotated bibliography: Digitally mediated surveillance, privacy and social network sites. Cybersurveillance and Everyday Life: An International Workshop. University of Toronto, Canada. Retrieved from http://www.digitallymediatedsurveillance.ca/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Raynes-Goldie-Digitally_mediated_surveillance_privacy_and_social_network_sites.pdf

Included citations:

Acquisti, A., & Gross, R. (2006). Imagined Communities: Awareness, Information Sharing, and Privacy on the Facebook. Proceedings from Privacy Enhancing Technologies Workshop, Cambridge, UK.

Albrechtslund, A. (2008). Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance. First Monday, 13(3). Retrieved from http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2142/1949

Andrejevic, M. (2005). The work of watching one another: Lateral surveillance, risk, and governance. Surveillance & Society, 2(4), 479-497. Retrieved from http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/articles2(4)/lateral.pdf

Barnes, S. B. (2006). A privacy paradox: Social networking in the United States. First Monday, 11(9). Retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1394/1312

Beer, D. D. (2008). Social network (ing) sites… revisiting the story so far: A response to danah boyd & Nicole Ellison. Journal of Computer‐Mediated Communication, 13(2), 516-529.

Bigge, R. (2006). The cost of (anti-)social networks: Identity, agency and neo-luddites. First Monday, 11(12). Retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1421/1339

boyd, d., & Ellison, N. B. (2008). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship. Journal of Computer‐Mediated Communication, 13(1), 210-230. Retrieved from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html

Brandtzæg, P. B., Lüders, M., & Skjetne, J. H. (2010). Too Many Facebook “Friends”? Content Sharing and Sociability Versus the Need for Privacy in Social Network Sites. Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 26(11-12), 1006-1030.

Dourish, P., & Anderson, K. (2006). Collective information practice: exploring privacy and security as social and cultural phenomena. Human-computer interaction, 21(3), 319-342. Retrieved from http://www.dourish.com/publications/2006/DourishAnderson-InfoPractices-HCIJ.pdf

Krishnamurthy, B., & Wills, C. E. (2008). Characterizing privacy in online social networks. Proceedings from Proceedings of the first workshop on Online social networks.

Lenhart, A. (2009). Adults and Social Network Websites. Retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2009/Adults-and-Social-Network-Websites.aspx

Nissenbaum, H. (2010). Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Palen, L., & Dourish, P. (2003). Unpacking “privacy” for a Networked World. Proceedings from CHI 2003, Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Raynes-Goldie, K. (2010). Aliases, creeping, and wall cleaning: Understanding privacy in the age of Facebook. First Monday, 15(1-4). Retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/2775/2432

Solove, D. J. (2007). Privacy in an Overexposed World. In The Future of Reputation. Yale University Press. Retrieved from http://docs.law.gwu.edu/facweb/dsolove/Future-of-Reputation/text/futureofreputation-ch7.pdf

Stumpel, M. (2010). The Politics of Social Media: Facebook: Control and Resistance. Master’s thesis. University of Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Tufekci, Z. (2008). Can You See Me Now? Audience and Disclosure Regulation in Online Social Network Sites. Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, 28(1), 20-36.

Utz, S., & Krämer, N. (2009). The privacy paradox on social network sites revisited: the role of individual characteristics and group norms. Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace, 3(2). Retrieved from http://www.cyberpsychology.eu/view.php?cisloclanku=2009111001&article=1

Zimmer, M. (2008). The externalities of Search 2.0: The emerging privacy threats when the drive for the perfect search engine meets Web 2.0. First Monday, 13(3), 2008. Retrieved from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/2136/1944

Additional Resources
danah boyd’s Bibliography of Research on Social Network Sites

Alice Marwick’s Online Identity Bibliography

My main argument is that MMOs for kids (especially those exclusively for girls, such as Barbie Girls which Sara Grimes has done some fascinating work on) present themselves as safe spaces where kids can play online and parents don’t have to worry about sexual predators or online bullying. However, MMOs for kids reinforce fear and the rhetoric of stranger danger (despite the fact that studies have shown that children are more likely to be harmed by people known to them) while obfuscating other very the real dangers that are actually created by the design of the MMOs themselves, especially in terms of reinscribing disempowering gender roles for girls and exposing them to endless marketing messages. For example, the objectives and activities in Barbie Girls, Club Penguin and Webkinz are all based around passive consumption of digital goods rather than creativity. And, more alarmingly, MMOs propose to keep kids safe by only allowing conversations through predetermined pull down menus of phrases, many of which limit a child’s expression to disempowering gender roles or advertising for the MMO itself (eg “Someone made fun of my outfit!” “I looked like a dork in gym class!”, “My crush found out I like him!” (Barbie Girls) or “I like to answer surveys to earn KinzCash.” (Webkinz)) The thought is that by preventing kids from sharing information about themselves online, they will be protected from stranger danger. The irony of all this is while youth are blamed for oversharing, 84% of Canadian children under the age of 2 have a digital footprint created by their parents.

A more broad and less obvious concern is the connection between autonomy, privacy and critical thinking (I thank Jason Nolan for this insanely brilliant insight). There is a huge body of research in early childhood education and developmental psychology that links privacy as a requirement for the development of autonomy and vice versa, as well as a host of other skills, such as making judgements, trust and analytical thinking (see Marx & Steeves, 2010; McKinney, 1998; Coleman & Hagell, 2007; and Davis, 2001). In the context of this research, the design of MMOs for kids tends to:

• Discourage creativity, autonomy, critical thinking
• Hider development of skills needed for privacy and trust
• Normalize covert surveillance
• Encourage self worth derived from consumption, economic buying power and appearance

To see the whole talk, check out the video. Jason Nolan, Melanie McBride and I have a paper forthcoming on all this.

I just came back from seeing The Social Network on opening night, in a packed theatre complete with a Tweetup filling the first two rows. I was impressed (especially after reading the rather disappointing ‘The Accidental Billionaires,’ the book the film was based on). But you can go read another much more excellent blog post about its cinematic, narrative or artistic merits. Instead, I’d like to offer my take on The Social Network as a Facebook researcher.

Gone Hollywood
In 1997, when I was a nerdy teenage girl sitting in my basement talking to my nerdy internet friends on IRC and ICQ, I never ever would have thought one day I would be seeing a Hollywood movie about the creation of anything to do with the internet (and written by Aaron Sorkin, directed by David Fincher, scored by Trent Reznor and starring Justin Timberlake, no less!) Back then, the internet was like my private, secret thing. I got a weird twinge the first time I overheard the ‘cool girls’ in the hallway whispering about how they were talking to boys they liked on ICQ. I realise it wasn’t just mine anymore. I still get this twinge whenever I’m reminded just how mainstream socializing online has become (even that phrase seems so outdated) – like today, when I went to see The Social Network on opening night.

The thing that most interested me was how the film would portray Zuckerberg, his motivations and the events that lead up to the Facebook we know today. As Aaron Sorkin admitted on the Colbert Report last night, no one other than those directly involved really know what happened. In some places, the film was very true to the available evidence. In the scene where Zuckerberg is creating the original Facebook site, the blog posts he makes are pretty much taken directly from his actual online diary which was used as a court document and later put online by 02138 magazine (and then, taken down because of legal battle with Facebook). As a wonderful nerd reference, Zuckerberg is shown to be blogging on LiveJournal under the account zuckonit. As awesome as it would be, I don’t think Zuckerberg used LiveJournal to host his blog from back then (anyone know? the source code shown in the court documents seem to indicate no).

Zuckerberg’s motivations
Like the LiveJournal reference, more often than not the film takes a lot of artistic license, especially with Zuckerberg’s motivations. The film’s plot revolves around Zuckerberg two supposed motivations for creating Facebook: women and getting into a final club. The scene where Zuckerberg creates Facemash (a pre-Facebook site like Hot or Not) right after being broken up by Erica Albright (Zuckerberg’s blog reveals this isn’t her real name) supports this notion because in the movie version, Facemash only compares female students. This assertion is also found in ‘The Accidental Billionaires,’ which is supposed to be non-fiction. However, the original Crimson story on Facemash (Harvard’s student paper) seems to indicate that both genders are comared, which makes Zuckerberg seem much more interested in creating something interesting rather than just wanting revenge on the general population of women for rejecting him. His preoccupation with Erica’s rejection runs throughout the film, which (spoilers!) closes on Zuckerberg looking lonely and deciding whether to Friend her or not. Again, the film leaves out an important detail – Zuckerberg had a girlfriend (Priscilla Chan, who is is still dating and will probably marry) throughout most of the events depicted in the film. The inaccuracies are not a surprise given that the film (and the book it was based on) are entirely based on everyone else’s accounts of what happened, with no input from any actual Facebook employee or Zuckerberg himself.

What the film does get totally right is that Zuckerberg is not motivated by money. Clearly, something else drives him, otherwise he would have sold Facebook to the hiddest bidder (and there have been many offers in the billions). But this something else probably isn’t as simple as women or getting into a final club. As Karel Baloun, an early Facebook engineer, reports in his book ‘Inside Facebook,’ Zuckerberg really believes he’s making the world a better place.

Anti-social networks
Like Temple Grandin‘s unique outsider perspective that enabled her to create more humane slaughterhouses (terrible analogy, I know) The Social Network ingeniously picks up Zuckerberg’s outsider-enabled ability to pick out the core social motivations and structures of humans that lead to the success of Facebook. Zuckerberg can only do this because he is on the outside looking in. This, on one hand gives him the critical distance to see what others can’t, but on the other leads, ironically, to the creation of a social network site that is actually profoundly anti-social.

All in all, The Social Network ‘underscores a cultural phenomenon‘ (duh). Go see it.

More? In time with the release of The Social Network, I was on MTV News this week to talk about Facebook and what it all means. Check it out (it’s clip 4).

• to add journals to their reading list.
• to facilitate relationships (both offline and exclusively online).
• to indicate trust.
• as a courtesy.
• as a declaration of some sort of relationship.
• for entertainment, friend collecting, as a game etc.

As a result of all these differing meanings for different people, the act of Friending or defriending could mean a lot to someone, while another person wouldn’t even give it a second thought. One person could defriend a friend because they were bored of reading their journal, while their now defriended friend might take the action as a commentary about their relationship. Throw in the fact that LJ Friending is essentially a way of controlling privacy (so it’s functional AND meaningful) and you have a recipe for DRAMA!

Now think about Facebook. This all sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Well in analysing my fieldwork last year I’m realising that even though the meanings of Friending on Facebook and LJ are both ambiguous, the way people react to that ambiguity is different.Now think about Facebook. This all sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Well in analysing my fieldwork last year I’m realising that even though the meanings of Friending on Facebook and LJ are both ambiguous, the way people react to that ambiguity is different. On LiveJournal, people acted on the angst caused by the Friending feature by writing angry posts or comments about when they were defriended, for example, to which the defriender would usually angrily reply, and then all the friends of both parties would reply and everyone else could watch and be amused. This dynamic gave birth to the very hilarious ljdrama.org, which sarcastically chronicled the latest disputes over who defriended who and why. (There’s still an awesome archive of everyone’s favourite LJ drama moments here.)

Yet there isn’t an fbdrama.org. How often do you actually see serious flamewar style drama playing out on someone’s wall? Hardly ever, right? So even though Friending on Facebook and Livejournal both cause angst because of the differing meanings it has for different people – we’ve all wondered why a certain person has added or removed us, or if we should accept a Friend request from someone we don’t really like – on Facebook, no one really seems to act on that angst so it never evolves into drama. Most of the angsty situations I’ve seen involve people telling their close friends that they’re unsure about adding someone, but I’ve never seen anyone actually confront a sketchy Friend requester or someone who has defriended them.

So, I wanna throw this out to everyone, especially people who are participating in my ethnography (you know who you are;) ). Do you think my observations are correct? If so, why do you think it’s the case? Your answers will influence what I write in my thesis, but do let me know if you don’t want me to quote you.

My initial hypothesis is that engaging in drama on Facebook would have social repercussions that wouldn’t happen to the same degree on LiveJournal. The stakes are higher on Facebook because you use your real name and personal info, and usually have most of the people you know from all aspects of your life as Friends. Messing with the people you only know online on Livejournal is a much lower risk than messing with someone who you work with or shares mutual friends. What do you think?

An American teen posted videos of himself brutally abusing his cat Dusty on YouTube over the weekend (I found the video so, so sad… it will haunt you). This enraged everyone’s favourite band of internet trolls, Anonymous, who decided to track him down and get him arrested. An unnamed person set up kenny-glenn.com with the personal contact details of the abuser and his family. After a flurry of activity all over the internets, which can be chronicled on Encyclopedia Dramatica (yes, as we will soon see, we have to use them as a reference because Wikipedia doesn’t have any information about what happened. How sad is that?), it was reported that Kenny Glenn has been arrested.

This case is interesting for a number of reasons, one of which is that it could also be the first time a loosely organized group of people on the internet initiated a campaign to identify a suspect and then notify the police… in the least no case before has been so high profile or had so many people involved.

Anyway, Wikipedia admins deleted the Kenny Glenn article and then blocked the creation of a new one, despite it being all over the news and the internet. I asked that the protection be removed, and I was told if I was to create a passable draft it might be used as an article since all the other edits had been vandalism. At the same time, a group of people from the Facebook group about the story created a page called “Timmy_(animal_abuse_suspect)” which was factual and backed up all its claims with journalistic sources, as required by Wikipedia. I followed up with the admin and asked if he/she could use the Timmy page as a draft. In response he deleted the Timmy article, saying it was a deliberate attempt to circumvent the protection placed on the Kenny Glenn article. I asked the admin again if the page could be used as a draft in the way he/she first proposed, to which the admin replied that he/she wanted to take “a step back” and another admin should deal with it. The admin then posted on some special Wikipedia notice board basically saying that his reason for blocking the article was about the questionable ethics of posting information about a minor. You can see our exchange here.

What stuck out for me was that this seemed to be more of an issue of following rules rather than making Wikipedia a better information source. We didn’t follow them perfectly, so the admins are upset that we challenged their authority (how dare we!) and then that becomes the reason to continue the protection on the page. From the time I spend wading through all the different rules and pages and guidelines made it very clear to me the system is a mess. After going through this, it is even more unclear to me as to what the process and rules actually are. I mean, the reason the admin gave me for the block switched from a lack of a neutral well sourced article to being an issue of ethics (if you look at the deleted Kenny Glenn page, even, the original reason for its deletion was listed as “Article about a real person, which does not indicate the importance or significance of the subject” – no mention of the issue being one of ethics.) I do agree there are issues with the suspect being a minor, but I think there is a lot more going on here. It also begs the question as to why information about this kid and the case itself can be all over the internet (in “credible” sources and otherwise) but that it is being blocked from being reproduced on Wikipedia. Isn’t one of the goals of Wikipedia to provide an open and valuable source of information that acts as an alternative to conventional sources of knowledge which are protected by gatekeepers? I mean how messed up is it that the mainstream news is covering it, but Wikipedia is censoring it?

As my friend Luke said so aptly: “Wikipedia started out as this great if somewhat unreliable source of information, but now there’s all these admins who think they’re holier-than-thou and if they haven’t heard about or don’t like something, it can’t possibly go. And what they don’t realize is that they’re just turning Wikipedia into a normal, old-school encyclopedia.” There’s also a great post on all these issues on the P2P foundation blog: Is something fundamentally wrong with Wikipedia governance processes?

This all makes me very, very sad. I was so excited about the potential of the internet, especially Wikipedia which I have heartily defended until this point. I believed Wikipedia was doing something truly collaborative, open, free and democratic. It was a sign that maybe, we could one day accomplish all of the things we haven’t been able to before – giving everyone a voice and getting rid of the gatekeepers that control knowledge and information. But this just shows that eventually, our hunger for power – and all those other terrible features of human nature – win out. I hope I can be proven wrong.

Welcome to Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

… right.

Mark: So, I could tell people you were my girlfriend?

Saz: Well, we might… take things slow, to start with, yeah?

Mark: Sure, but we could still have fun, and y’know, watch Morse, and people could see us out together, like at my birthday party on Friday. And I could put a photo of us on Facebook?

Saz: …Sure… All that stuff.

[Episode 3, Season 5]

So there you go, if you weren’t already convinced that Facebook is now just a normal part of everyday life in places like London and Toronto (and that the performativity and rituals of of dating now include Facebook photos).

As I mentioned, early Facebook was like any other social networking site, except that it was aimed at the niche market of university students. It was the functionality of these sites that gave rise to the term online social networking – you add your friends and in essence make tangible your offline social network. (Something I’m investigating is the development of that term – did the sites actually ever use it themselves, or did the academics/bloggers come up with it?) Anyway, on Friendster back in the day (2003) I remember my friends and I all got excited and spent hours adding everyone we knew. Then we had added everyone, and got bored, and thought “now what?” There was really nothing to do with that meticulously created list of friends. So we all forgot about it. But Facebook went beyond that, and gave us something to do with that list. They’ve made that list your audience, your contact list, your source of information and your entertainment. I think its fair to say that Facebook has gone beyond what we first called a social networking site.

danah boyd and Nicole Ellison recently proposed that the term should be social network, rather than social networking sites because the latter implies that active searching for and engagement with new people. Facebook and other sites aren’t really about meeting new people, they’re about growing and maintaining existing relationships with people we already know. As we all know, adding someone you don’t know on Facebook has become a total faux pas. For them, the primary characteristic of social network sites, or whatever you want to call them, is that they allow you to create and show your social network. But I think that’s only the beginning of what Facebook is today. That social network is definitely the foundation for all of the other activities on the site, but I don’t think that it’s still the defining characteristic.

I think the best way to understand how Facebook has gone beyond being just a social networking site is to see how it has evolved from what we meant by social networking site in 2004. Facebook’s three big axes of change can be summarized in terms of access, audience and information the first two of which are closely intertwined. The first Facebook, which was actually officially called thefacebook at the time (pictured courtesy archive.org) was essentially just your profile and a list of your friends, like all good social networks of the time (and still some today).

Access-wise, early Facebook was closed – you needed a valid email address from an approved school to join, which was just Harvard at first. The audience was students exclusively, and had features specifically for that purpose, such as being able to see who was in your classes. Or helping you get laid, as Karel Baloun, one of the first Facebook engineers, suggests in his book on the subject: “Facebook gives users what they want, which for college students is information about their friends and schoolmates for the purpose of… well … sex. And fun social events, which lead to sex” (Inside Facebook, p 91). And lastly, the information on thefacebook was ephemeral. You could change stuff on your profile, and no one would know unless they went looking and could remember what you had there before. As danah boyd puts it, there was security in obscurity. Closed doors, ephemeral information and a student-only audience made people feel safe sharing their real and personal details about themselves. If only other students will see, and only those I want, it’s okay for me to post my dorm room and mobile number on Facebook. In fact, people felt encouraged to do so. There was a pay off – it made socializing easier. People will give up their privacy if they get something in exchange, like free air travel (Air Miles cards) or convenience (putting your thumb and iris on file to cross the border faster, as with the Nexxus card in North America). It was this closed, student only phase in Facebook’s history that created Facebook’s continuing culture of sharing lots of accurate personal information that gives Facebook its tremendous value. I suspect things would not be the same if Facebook had opened up to everyone right away, since it was still unusual to so closely tie one’s offline life and identity with their online one.

Anyway, as we all know, Facebook opened it’s doors to everyone. Slowly at first, with high school kids first being allowed on (September 2005). Then select companies, such as Apple and Microsoft (May 2006), then everyone (September 2006).** This fateful day in September was also the day that Facebook added the News and Mini-Feeds. It was a double whammy. No longer could you feel projected from the rest of the world by Facebook’s walls of valid-email-requirements and that feel relatively assured that those drunken party photos from last night’s kegger would probably not grace the eyes of your boss.*** In fact, now, your boss would probably get notified that the pictures were posted, via her shiny new News Feed. All at once, everything was different.

First, the information on Facebook that had once been ephemeral was now not only artifactual, but was also being actively pushed to your friends. The formerly invisible act of updating your profile was now visible. Activities change when we know people are watching. They become performative. Now, not only was your profile performative, but the act of maintaining it was also a performance. The addition of feeds made it possible to watch snippets of our friends lives, without having to interact with them or even having them know we watching. It’s the replacement of reciprocal interaction with information flows. The recent redesign has reinforced this informational shift. The default thing you see when you view someone’s profile is no longer their personal and contact information, but the activity from their wall and mini-feeds combined. In fact, you could probably say this is an emerging axis of change on Facebook that is strongly related to the informational shift – a shift in focus from personal information to a focus on one’s activity and interactions with others.

Secondly, Facebook had moved from being closed to open access, and in so doing had changed from catering to students to catering to everyone. This change in audience not only meant changes in Facebook’s affordances to make it more appealing to a mainstream audience (for example, getting rid of the courses feature), but a change in every users’ potential audience. Now all the early adopters had to rethink if that profile they had created when Facebook was students-only was appropriate for everyone in their lives to potentially see.

I had a bit of an interesting experience with this shift in audience. I had been on Facebook since 2004, but didn’t really use it in the university context since I had already graduated earlier that year. I did, however, use it primarily with people from my personal rather than professional life. But, when Facebook took off in Toronto in late 2006 (pictured in action on the right), I was working at a place that blended the personal and the professional, as I think a lot of young high tech firms do these days. Anyway, it took me a while after Facebook opened up to everyone to realise that my vague feeling of discomfort when using Facebook stemmed from the fact that Facebook had essentially mashed up all my contexts into one big context, yet out of habit, I was still using and thinking about the site as if I was just interacting with close friends in terms of sharing more and different things that I probably would’ve otherwise. From talking to other people about this, I think this experience is common for a lot of early adopters, but I think it may have been even more subtle for me given the culture of where I was working at the time.

So what is Facebook now? I’m still working on it, but it’s more than a social networking site since creating and articulating our networks is definitely only the foundation of what we’re actually doing on Facebook these days. The front page of Facebook (the one you see when you’re logged out) says it’s a “social utility” that can be used to “keep up with friends and family; share photos and videos; control privacy online; and reconnect with old classmates.” But overall, it “connects you with the people around you.” Baloun (remember that Facebook engineer?) says that “everything social can be transacted inside [Facebook]” (Inside Facebook, p 71). While not yet a reality, it’s certainly Zuckerberg’s fantasy of how he wants Facebook to be, and says a lot about what I think is an inherent believe at Facebook: that everything can be reduced to 1s and 0s. Today, Facebook is social networking, but its also life streaming, photo sharing, video sharing, blogging, event organizing and a bunch of other stuff we haven’t got proper names for yet. But take that thought and add this: some would say that like MySpace, Facebook is “the next generation of marketing, advertising and promotion, exquisitely disguised as social networking.” A little scary, no?

—
* Even my favorite, LiveJournal, has remained basically the same since 1999, but it looks like that might be changing since SUP bought them. I haven’t decided if this is good or bad yet, but Facebook has shown that even relatively minor-ish changes like Feeds can change the whole culture, meaning and use of a site.

** Of course, it is important to point out that a lot of the safety in Facebook’s student-only access was psychological. Stuff still leaked out, and school admins and other unwelcome people still got in. But the power of that sort of belief, and the culture of accurate personal information sharing that came from it, cannot be ignored. However, when Facebook opens its doors, the reality of the situation hits you right in the face. Its not easy to go on believing that what you put on Facebook will stay there.

*** Note that both the opening to high school kids and everyone were in September, the start of the school year in North America.

Anyway, I was digging through my old emails to try and figure out when the University of Toronto network was added to Facebook (as far as I can tell, it was late November 2004, according to good old Archive.org), as well as when I first joined and found this:

From: “thefacebook.com” <confirm@thefacebook.com>
Date: 20 December 2004 9:40:32 AM
To: raynes.goldie@*******
Subject: elvedin t******* has listed you as a friend…

Elvedin T******* has requested to add you as a friend, but before we can
do that, you must confirm that you are in fact friends with Elvedin.

To confirm this request, go to:
http://utoronto.thefacebook.com/confirminvite.php

Thanks,
thefacebook team.

The funny thing is, I’ve never actually met the guy. In fact, in the beginning almost all my Facebook friends were people I only knew from other sites, like LiveJournal. Did that happen to anyone else? It’s almost like we all hadn’t worked out how we were “supposed” to use it yet, and we were still in that phase where we could be somewhat anonymous online, with identities that were unconnected and undetermined by our “real” lives.

Also funny that it used to be called thefacebook, especially since now they seem to have a strong aversion to the word. At SXSW this year all the devs at the developer garage talked about “Platform,” and all descriptions of features on the Facebook blog talk about “Feed” or “Mini-Feed.” Weird. And kinda cult like.

Extra bonus: does anyone remember what used to be written at the bottom of Facebook? It said “a Mark Zuckerberg production” and “I’ll find something to put here” but I also remember something about guns… Anyone?

It’s still not as crazy as Toronto, but my gut feeling is that it won’t ever be. The way people use the internet here and the way people socialize just isn’t as compatible with the Facebook way of doing things. I have to think about the specifics more, but I think it has a lot to do with using mobiles (Perth) over the internet on a desktop computer and having lots and of cheap internet access in every home (Toronto). And, as Alex Leitch brilliantly pointed out, Toronto is already divided up in a networky way – with a bunch of very distinct neighbourhood nodes linked together by an excellent transit system. Torontonians are already thinking in a Facebooky way.