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With very few exceptions, I have ran across everyone I ever went to high school with on Facebook. From the first week I joined, I was inundated with friend requests from everyone you could imagine. In many cases they were even people I don’t remember getting along with at all. Of course you, probably just like them, add them hoping to turn over a new leaf and show how much you have grown since high school.

The interesting part is that we have all grown since high school, but not always in the ways we might expect. Many people I expected to stay close with for life, I was still close with without Facebook. Some people who I thought I would be friends with forever, I lost touch with way before Facebook, and instead of rekindling those friendships with this new connection, I only confirmed how trivial they were to start with.

The real interesting ones are some of the people I had little to no contact with. After high school, life swallowed us up, chewed on us awhile, spit us out, and we landed with common ground that connected personalities that we would have otherwise never found.

So what’s the moral here? I would say there isn’t much of one you can do anything with now. Take the chance to add those people you never thought you clicked with. Get involved and take an interest to see where everyone landed. Once you survey the landscape and figure out who is meaningful to you, drop the outliers. Build a clan, share your life and have fun.

The real value of Facebook to me is those interactions. I would wake up tomorrow a happy man if a virus ripped through Facebook over night and shredded all of the fan pages, the Mob Wars, faux-causes and quizzes. Those things are on a one way trip to ignore-ville for me anyway. But I still thank Facebook for helping me put some perspective on relationships that I have questioned for years, and helping me find new ones.

I guess money talks… BING!

The background, the top banner and the top right ad, woof

I wish I could have saved Trent a little time. Having cut my internet teeth in 1993 lurking in IRC chat rooms, I know all too well the kind of people that plague the internet. I say plague because like any social ecosystem there are the deviants that attempt to corrupt it because they cannot find a way to participate in it in a constructive manner. It’s just a sad reality that we have come to accept. So with this, the idiots have ruined it for the rest of us and Trent is leaving Twitter.

Thanks for giving it a shot Trent, I enjoyed it while it lasted and will continue to check out NIN.com from time to time.

In Trent’s case, it was pretty easy to see this coming. Think about it for a minute and you will find that for any system, there will be anarchists who thrive on trying to break down the organized collective. That doesn’t mean that there wasn’t value in Trent Reznor’s experiment. That doesn’t mean that I don’t applaud him for the effort. I will miss his presence on Twitter because I enjoyed seeing the human side of the fierce music.

Anonymity Sucks

I bet you hate that one. That’s really the trick though. If you were to look at all of the hate comments I get, and I get a lot, almost all of them are posted with bogus email addresses. I am not a celebrity. I might reach 20,000 people a month with my blog. Trent Reznor reaches millions. Take the hate I get, amplify it by exponential idiots, religious zealots and the Metal Sludge contingents he mentions, and you have a perfect storm of hate. The sad truth is that most of the people spewing this garbage would gush and fawn if they met him in person.

I seriously doubt that if I met one of my haters in public they would walk up, punch me in the face, yell Microsoft sucks and then take away my laptop. That’s what they would have you think. I am often told I am too stupid to own a computer. Yes, I develop software for the largest computer software maker in the world. I create music and artwork on computers and am quite savvy on the little electronic buggers, but obviously a 15 year old Digg user knows much more than me and by that feels the right to banish me from the internet. Riiiiiight.

Facebook Can Help

Facebook is ubiquitous and has something really powerful going for it. People have their friends and family on there. It publishes your activity. I am sure you are wondering what Facebook would have to do with Nine Inch Nails, Digg or Engadget type user communities. Facebook Connect could be the key.

Real Identity

Facebook users represent themselves with their real names and real identities. With Facebook Connect, users can bring their real identity information with them wherever they go on the Web, including: basic profile information, profile picture, name, friends, photos, events, groups, and more.

It will be hard to get through the ability to create an account just to hag with, but potentially there could be ways to thwart that. Maybe you have some rules in place like minimum account life, number of friends, etc. Create some way to prove that it’s a person who is actively using it. I guarantee you that the number of hateful profane comments is seriously limited when people you know and have some respect for can see them.

It’s not the answer, just an idea

Adding a big brother element isn’t the right answer. It’s just a thought of where we can start. As awesome as anonymity is when you want to order some weird sex toy or order Viagra, (heh) there are some ways that it is limiting the growth and usefulness of the internet. I guarantee I am not the only one that completely ignores comments on Digg.com. I bet I am not the only one that goes out of my way to avoid getting drawn into a flame thread on a blog. Even in IRC chat on #Wordpress on irc.freenode.net, which is a really valuable forum for people developing with WordPress, there are trolls. They come in and dog people, flood people, and are just simply dicks. If we figure out a way to keep these pricks from hiding behind an ISP and a fake (and probably cooler than they really are) persona, the quality of conversation on the internet will probably increase exponentially.

I had read a little about the new Facebook user names today, and was surprised at the flaming negativity on Facebook’s blog post describing the feature. It was, well, read it:

That’s a bit overboard don’t you think? Facebook user names are a great idea and here is why:

1. Today, Facebook is most people’s online presence. It has replaced (for the most part) personal blogs, photo sharing sites, journals and social networks. It’s all of these combined. When you make a new contact and want to share your Facebook presence with them today, you have to say “You can find me on Facebook.” The user can then look you up and home there aren’t a bunch of people with your name. Facebook Profiles allow you to just say “I am at Facebook.com/jasonburns” and you are done.
2. Right now, linking to a Facebook profile is really ugly. Adding what is basically “pretty permalinks” gives Facebook a much better link story for business and fan pages. They link easier and are better for Search Engine Optimization.
3. It just makes perfect sense, get over it.

It’s coming, it’s overdue and it’s a good thing. Let it happen, calm down, I promise it will be ok.

Google wants you to forget about Windows, Mac OS X And Linux. The latest ploy is to use HTML 5 to gather support for putting all of our personal computers on a serious diet. I don’t mean the type of diet that gave us iPhones and net books, the kind that gives us strings, entanglements and dependencies.

The Cloud is Scary

I am not talking about “steal your credit card” scary. The cloud is scary because any number of issues can separate you from your data. There are the obvious issues like your internet is down or the internet is acting slow for some unknown reason. But there are more obscure things that should really concern those of us that rely on the internet to store our data.

Who Owns My Email

I have become 100% reliant on Gmail. I use IMAP to keep my client updated, but in all honesty rarely use it. I live in the browser for personal email 99% of the time. I use a thick outlook client at work, but my personal email is now thin.

The reality is that Google can, and is, sift through my email at their own leisure to try and find better ways to sell me stuff. I am not a big brother fanatic, but it seems like they already have quite a grip on my personal life and data.

I know they say “Don’t be Evil,” but I am not so trusting.

Living Offline

Sometimes you aren’t connected. Sure Google Gears is a step in the right direction, but I don’t want thick clients to die. I like my fast, sleek and polished desktop applications. I like not worrying about JavaScript errors and what browser I am using. For some things it’s great, but I don’t see Logic Studio or Adobe Photoshop going thin (I know there is a thin Photoshop, but it’s not Photoshop, seriously.)

Other Solutions

I am already a loyal fan of the Windows Live Mesh services. I get my thin access to my files, but they are all synchronized and stored offline on my local machines (both PC and Mac) This is the best of both worlds solutions. I have thin access and convenience, but when the presentation that I have to finish is nearing the deadline, it doesn’t matter if I lose my internet access or decide to go to the cabin for the weekend and finish it. I still have it and don’t need internet access to work with it. Try doing that with Google Docs.

The Real World

We are always going to have taxing applications, we are always going to want games and graphics heavy applications. No matter how well you equip the browser for an immersive experience, you will still need horsepower. My fear is that the world gets sold on this thin client mentality, powerful computers become niche, and you have to pay through the nose to use something with some horsepower.