….maybe. In those “primitive times” in which we postmoderns existed with pre-SIM card cell phones, there were funny “I got a new phone, and lost all my numbers. Can I have yours again?” or “Oh, I know why you have my number but I don’t have your number! (Awkward pause….because you know this person didn’t make it to the new phone for x,y,z reason) I got a new phone” conversations at parties. Now, with that solved, thanks to the SIM card, we have other, similarly annoying, issues. The one that Facebook’s new initiative attempts to solve is quite similar, though with email, IM, and other identities that exist across platforms.
The NY Times reports that Facebook is launching a new initiative called “Facebook Connect,” that will serve to allow other non-Facebook sites and online platforms to use and link with Facebook’s services. An example of this would be if your Gmail and Facebook account could “talk” with one another and automatically generate your Contacts list in Gmail from your Friends list from Facebook. It’s very unremarkable but makes a pretty tedious process (adding Google Contacts) into a far less painful endeavor. A iPhone application, called Friend Book has so cleverly solved the issue of manually typing in contact info by having a motor-tactical (by which I mean touch movement) solution. All you have to do is shake (like a Polaroid picture…sorry I had to bring that back) 2 iPhones to exchange data. Freakin’ GENIUS! The days of exchanging contact info via text message are long gone. See below:
Anyway, the problem of smooth data exchange and meta-identification, which Facebook is trying to get at, is not really new to most of us who have been to college, let’s say. It’s something that every database necessitates–a means by which to identify individuals or groups across different informational milieux in order to keep track of them. At college, we had something called a WesID, onto which you everything you did that related to the university was funneled, recorded and kept. But the advantage that universities and workplaces have is that they have a single platform that they are working with. In the real world, where various media languages and technological platforms criss-cross rather herky-jerkily, developing the dominant meta-language is not only technologically innovative and thus will wet nerd panties all over the world, but it is a lucrative market endeavor. And that is exactly what Facebook is trying to do with this Facebook Connect business. If they pull it off, it will be something else. But regardless of whether they succeed, this the area where the $ and effort is being channeled on the business side of the tech world.
There is no such thing as the Holy Grail in the tech world because the Internet operates on a different plane of causality. Or maybe there are Holy Grails that are far more temporary, something like every half-a-fiscal quarter. What happens is that accidentally something takes off and becomes popular–we can think of the Internet as a “bastard” itself, developed out of Cold War-era Department of Defense networking technologies. In other words, what Facebook or Apple talks about in their press releases are usually not what become the driving forces of the technology. Apple, for example, was quite wrong on the first generation iPhone because they were really not up on the application-side of the phone. Finally with the 3G, they’ve expanded on it (maybe to a fault). But for now, we should be on the look out for the new meta-connectivity platform, whether it be from Facebook or Google or whomever.
