** My Intellectual Flakes **

In the cover story on Newsweek, the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg talked about an interesting concept “social graph“. He described it as “a mathematical construct that maps the real-life connections between every human”. What Facebook is striving for is to “construct as accurate of a model as possible of the way the social graph looks in the world”. It’s pretty much like mapping the existing social connection in the offline life in the online realm. He also noted that

“Facebook isn’t intended as a venue to seek out new people, though certainly it’s possible…”.

However, Facebook is criticized for its closeness. What posted on Facebook can’t be googled. For someone people that’s a weakness; but for others, that’s exactly what attract them to Facebook. They don’t want everything they put on web to be searchable and public to everyone.

Also, Karp identify the main problem of social website as

“… the inability of the “social graph” on the web to capture the infinite variability of human relationships — and the limited nature of social applications, which don’t enable us to communicate and interact with each of the people we know in all the myriad and infinitely varied ways we do offline.”

One thing is sure, Facebook is not for everyone. And that’s is fine. As Jenkins (2006) maintained:

Compared to the one-size-fits-all diet of the boradcast networks, the coming media age would be a “feast of niches and specialties.”

What we can see is the emergence of various tools catering to different users and needs.