The Ghetto Called Facebook

After reading the article, it kinda sounds to me like Dvorak just can't see Facebook's relevance as a communication tool for people who aren't super skilled with computers. I'm not really a fan of Facebook myself, but shantanubala is right; It does help people connect and share information easier. I wouldn't agree with Dvorak that Facebook is a ghetto, then again the definition of the word "friend" seems to be a little different these days.

> Load World of Warcraft and play something that reflects real development efforts rather than cute marketing tricks.

I love that line.

The achievement of WoW is to inflate the importance mouse clicks to an insane level by a more complex mechanism.

That is all.

> I think it's brilliant that the boys at Facebook are taking on Netflix by developing their own streaming service

Assuming Dvorak's talking about the newly-announced Dark Nights rentals, he's talking about a third-party app developed by Warner Bros, not a ploy by Facebook itself.

I wouldn't bother bringing up a small factual error like this, but it really digs into the point of his article: it's a lot harder to build up the idea of Facebook as an evil monopolizing force trying to lock people into their platform when it's third-party content producers that are actively pulling people into the FB ecosystem.

You could argue that this is a result of their efforts to attract developers to the FB Credit platform, and that's just an attempt to attract and lock in users. That's definitely true, but you can't really call a neighborhood a 'ghetto' when it's got a posh shopping mall full of big-name department stores.

I don't think he seriously views Second Life as a real competitor - he was just using it to draw an analogy.

As for the community, I believe the "fakeness" he's getting at is the ability of the user to carefully cultivate their likeness and project a version of themselves that may or may not be truly reflective of "reality".

Of course, one could argue that we are always cultivating a "desired image" of ourselves. However, Facebook and similar platforms provide visual and textual clues that allow users to more concretely realize social relationships. This in turn may allow them to go above and beyond the normative level of image moderation. Whether that is "good" or "bad" is another question altogether.

Facebook will too pass....