Random notes on Facebook, Fathers' Day, and library stuff

I'm a 40 hour veteran  of Facebook now.  Some early reflections:

• I've made some contacts that surprised and pleased, with colleagues and friends I haven't been in touch with in some time.
• I became my son Brendan's 700th friend
• I realize that having friend-access to one's progeny enables a degree of familiarity I'd rather not exercise (but thanks, Brendan!)
• My favorite thing so far is seeing what one's friends are 'up to', whether a throw away status message, or, more usefully, what groups they are joining.  Though I cannot currently claim having learned or done something useful as a result, I think there is great potential in this as a sort of guided serendipity.
• My least favorite things thus far:
  • giving out an email password so that Facebook can pillage my contact list for members.  Its a perfect example, though, of the tradeoffs against our privacy which beckon to us, and changing passwords isn't so onerous, I suppose.
  • Facebook forces you into radiobutton category choices which constrain artificially (for example, the How do you know X dialog box) [as I was writing this post, Lorcan appeared in my Facebook Friends feed, having posted a note by David Winer about just this problem
  • I want the Web to work more like this, and not be bounded by a Web-platform utility.  The value that comes from this stuff is proportional to the number of participants (well, participation in general I suppose).  Should we really want or expect Facebook to become the dominant platform?  Monoculture is always more productive in the short term, and always pathological in the long term.

I must say, its fun so far.  It will be quite interesting to see if it can be productive as well.

On an entirely different topic, two BBC radio reports caught my attention on Saturday and Sunday mornings respectively.

The first was a BBC Global Business report (Peter Day, the presenter, has become a favorite of mine) about Tim Smit's, a 'social entrepreneur' and his Monkey Business principles.  Basically, they all have to do with creating and nurturing a creative business environment where people will surface rather than bury their passions, where social discourse fuels work, where people entertain and even cook for one another, and can openly articulate why they like working somewhere.  One that struck me... Make important decisions at night, in social engagements.  It reminded me of the wine-besotted working group meeting in OCLC's Conference Room 1 (I think it was 1... I was the besotted one) during the second night of the first Dublin Core meeting.  We broke  some rules, and broke through some barriers that night.  Ever since, the social events at the DC meetings have been a key part of progress, and laptops-at-the-bar was standard operating procedure.

The show this morning had to do with mobile libraries around the world: where they are fading, and where they remain a fundamental aspect of connecting people and resources.  The Kenya Camel library (I almost typed Kamel) is an example, but  I'm not sure these pictures were even from the specific  show I heard.  It frustrates me that I couldn't easily locate audiofeeds for either of these reports... they were great.

Speaking of connections, I heard from both of our boys today for Fathers' Day... one calling from London, the other from a moving truck (Pensacola to Corpus Christi).  Life is good.

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The lilies in my yard are in full bloom

Comments

[Erin]

The "make decisions at night" while it sounds great, really penalizes employees who have kids they need to be putting to bed at that time. And by "employees", by and large, I mean "mothers".

[Jonathan Rochkind]

Is this giving out an email password thing on Facebook new? I swear I can't remember doing that when I signed up years ago for the account I never use except to approve others friend requests (it makes me feel rude to ignore them). I don't think I'd be willing to do that.

On this "creative business environment" thing, which is really about mixing social and business. On the one hand, without a doubt, the best experiences of my life have been working with groups that operate like that. But this has all been unpaid 'work' and/or people collectively starting a business as equals, on projects that seriously mattered to them personally.

To me, trying to duplicate this in an actual business environment (where at least one of the reasons everyone is THERE rather than somewhere else is the paycheck) seems to me to sometimes work, and sometimes instead feel like the boss/orgnization is trying to get more of my soul than I want to give them. I need a life outside my job too--to do things that are important even though they don't pay.

[K.G. Schneider]

In my comments on an e-participation report that is going to ALA COO, I suggested scrapping the ghastly ALA "online community" software and trying to buy our own copy of Facebook. I don't know what I'm doing on it either, but as an app, well, I kinda like it.