Friday, November 19, 2010

Facebook - not quite ruling the web

I see Facebook is getting a lot of news commentary stimulated by the release of the movie "The Social Network". I have not seen the movie - so this is only a comment about the comments. Facebook may dominate some of the web space but as far as I can tell it is not successful in techie networking - that is sharing information in a productive way, as an expert conversation or even as a geek specialist interest fun thing. As far as on line film-making discussions go, the specialist website forums seem to be holding their own. Notable examples on my radar include www.creativecow.com, www.48hours.co.nz, www.daz3d.com. In the case of 48 hours, the organisers' efforts to move discussions to Facebook appear to have failed with the community sticking to its trad forum.

In the web developer part of my life, I am interested in the functions for linking to Facebook. There is some positive potential there of usefully connecting scattered information but I intend to evaluate keeping some healthy skepticism in place over information control and privacy issues.