The oversimplified world of facebook

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2008/06/23 00:37 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2008/06/22/8639173.aspx

One funny thing about facebook is that there are pages for celebrities.

You know, famous people.

The pages provide info about appearances and such and if one follows and if one is a fan of the famous person, then this is very useful information....

Now in facebook if you want to "follow" the person the exact action is called becoming a fan of the person.

This is a bit of an oversimplification, since there are many reasons one may wish to follow a person in this way.

But it is no less reasonable of an oversimplification than the act of "friending" someone being the only way to get someone on your list of people who you have that connected kind of relationship with that in real life may be either significantly more than or significantly less or even just significantly different than what any normal person would call "friends".

This is what makes videos like Facebook in Real Life so funny -- because this oversimplified world is pretty funny when looked at through the real world filter!

Now of course famous people, like everyone else, are allowed to be on facebook as people.

You know, since famous people are people too and all.

And a famous person may well want to be able to follow that page about themselves -- for example to make sure that events and information are properly reported there, and in a timely manner.

So how does the famous person indicate in the world of facebook the desire to follow the events.

You see where this is going, right?

Here, I'll give an example, one that people here will probably know quite well:

If I were famous (which I am not), then one day the big feed might say to all of those who have friend'ed me:

Michael Kaplan has become a fan of Michael Kaplan

..which would be just plain silly, for me -- it is probably one of the reasons I am not famous!

I won't even discuss the calculus of meaning inherent in this one; suffice to say that there are enough times that I am not a fan of what I do that I might not choose to become a fan. I also won't talk about what happens with those who "friend'ed" me would decide they aren't fans? :-)

A rather amusing aspect of the oversimplified world of facebook, in my opinion....

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