People have been meeting through the web since the first web page was made..the 'socialness' of the web was here long before facebook...facebook has not made any shift on how people are social on the web.
People have been using things like yahoo chat, yahoo groups geocities and even newsgroups to 'hook up' for a long time.
If there is a facebook generation , is there a myspace generation too? what about a hi5 generation..oh wait, what about a twitter generation?
Why exactly is it that people seem to set aside rational thinking when it concerns facebook?
>Its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has even declared his quest to chart a "social graph" of human relationships the way that cartographers once charted the world.
Whether or not Facebook is worth 10 billion dollars on the market today as an acquired company is irrelevant; Facebook does represent a shift in how we are social on the internet. Hacker News does as well, but I've only met people who are willing to meet up with me in cities other than Pittsburgh and on Facebook they all live in Pittsburgh.
If nothing better comes along, Facebook will be worth more than 10 billion dollars in the long run. There's also a good chance something better will come along, and it will probably happen overnight if Google buys the old TV frequencies and licenses space on all the old TV towers. Maybe someone smart will figure out how to implement the semantic web by himself or with a YC style investor.
The barriers between the web and the real world have really started to dissolve. I know a lot of people around my age that are in long term (for 22 year olds) relationships with people they met on the internet.
The Facebook Generation is a small part of America. It's the people who went to four year universities and their friends. For all of my age-group peers, I use the descriptor Generation Y because I hope that generations X, Y, and Z are the final generations of Humanity. Hopefully by the time that Generation Z has children we will all be Post-Humans, sipping our drinks in the enlightenment of eternity.
"... My generation has long been bizarrely comfortable with being looked at, and as performers on the Facebook stage, we upload pictures of ourselves cooking dinner for our parents or doing keg stands at last night's party; we are reckless with our personal information. But there is one area of privacy that we won't surrender: the secrecy of how and whom we search. ..."
I listened to a sobering talk by "Eben Moglen, 'Freedom Businesses Protect Privacy', mp3, 18Mb, 40min" ~ http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail1897.html about just this scenario about data and the rights to infer, think, collect, evaluate and express. The key takeaway, these users are living with giving away their data without contractual agreements and are ignoring the consequences.
The biggest threat to privacy is private company data miners who you freely give data. Inference drawn the data is private property. But it's not all doom and gloom but do you trust those who have bailment over you own data? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailment
"... But there's no way Facebook would allow such a program to exist: the site is popular largely because it enables us to indulge our gazes anonymously. ..."
That's not true. There is a Fb internal application that works out the probability of 2 people who will go out together based on Fb data. So don't bet on it.
