Technogearophilia

To a large extent technology doesn’t change people; it only changes the means and venues of the expression of their basic natures. This is quite evident with the advent of Web 2.0 and social media.

People are people and they gather in the same sort of cliques and self-segregate within the “confines” of social media in the same ways, though often based on different selection criteria, as they did and still do in real life (IRL).

And people often have issues maintaining a balance in their lives and Social Media becomes just another vice in their lives or a replacement expression of a previous vice.

Pick Your Poison

It’s “same old, same, old,” in the digital world because we’re still Humanity 1.0 and nobody has identified an upgrade path for us. So settle in with a cool glass of Facebook and we’ll do a few shot of YouTube later.

Despite the ongoing battle between the major players in the Social Media marketspace, there’s room for all of them because they’re not that similar to each other. They each cater to differing user needs.

What’s important is for the user base to determine which Social Media platform is the right Social Media for them.

Obviously, due to convergence, Twitter is and will continue to be the big winner in the Social Media wars because it can be used in conjunction with all the other offerings. It also seems to be the new weapon in the arsenal of the world’s revolutionaries.

Paul Butler, an intern at Facebook, made a map visualizing Facebook friendships. It is, as first glance, both interesting and compelling. Just by plotting Facebook users’ listed hometowns and mapping their online friendships Butler, who unsurprisingly is interning with Facebook’s data infrastructure engineering team, managed to create a map of the Earth and her cities just with a color ramp projection of those friendships.

Compare The Two Maps (Click to Enlarge)

It is interesting that Butler’s projection effectively drew the continents and even some national boundaries, but it’s not really surprising or a particularly great revelation.

Butler’s projection matches well with NASA’s light map of the Earth. That means it matches up well with regional population densities and technology levels, which shouldn’t be a shock to anyone.

In all likelihood, you could create the same map, or one damn close to it, by plotting the traffic to any set a major websites. The internet follows civilization and Facebook is part of the internet.