Ok, Facebook freaks, start copying all your precious personal tidbits and paste them somewhere. That 4-paragraph-long list of favorite movies, copy-n-paste. That 3-page note about the meaning of life, copy-n-paste. That funny thread from your high school boyfriend that made your knees knock again, copy-n-paste. Get ready to rebuild your profiles because Google is gunning for Facebook.
According to TechCrunch sources, Google Me is real.
Buzz didn’t create any, so Google is going big with a social networking site to rival the big wall in the sky. Isn’t it interesting that 500 million people have been satisfied with publishing little bits of themselves at a time? There’s no “body of work” on Facebook, just thought streams and consciousness streams and, sure, rivers of time.
Is anyone out there intested in creating something that will last? If Facebook is the internet equivalent of chatting at the water cooler, if blogging (133 million of us) is compared to letter writing, if creating your own website is synonymous to hanging a shingle, how do we push the paradigm? Is there something conceptually greater out there in the world of personal publishing?
I’ve been pretty vocal about Facebook’s fraility and lack of vision. Sure it connects us. But it doesn’t elevate us or our collective consciousness.
I don’t know what I’m searching for, but I’ll know when Google finds it.
Your question is relevant. I believe that content with depth will last. It doesn’t matter if it is a quote/poem/essay/book or a tweet/text/blog/book. Or a cave painting for that matter. A vast quantity of content will be lost due to sheer volume, but so what? It will give the next generation the chance to be significant.
Hi Julie. Thanks for reading. So interesting that you brought up the cave painting. I was talking to Mike Bonifer from GameChangers.com last week (who happens to be my professor’s husband) and he talked about how cave drawings really were the dawn of social media! I love the idea that quality content will rise like cream to the top. And, you’re right, we’ve got to leave something behind for the kids to do.