COLUMN: The expanding social network
To my venerable ancestors and forefathers, I have this to say; your life must have stunk.
To my children, children's children and so on; I am jealous beyond words.
The reason, of course, is Facebook and Twitter.
Even the generation before mine is disadvantaged. Myspace is an old farmer who plows his fields with oxen and chews on wheat to help his concentration during the annual barn repainting.
But now, with most of the Internet world on Facebook, things that were never before even thinkable are a reality. It's like the world's yearbook.
Now, I can keep track of all the people I went to high school with and see the minute details of the everyday lives of acquaintances. I can know who's working from 4 to 8 p.m., who ate peanut butter and jelly for lunch and who's just so sick and tired of being sick and tired. It's like I never left my hometown at all.
It will only get better. With Facebook to soon go public, the company will reach new heights, achieve things greater than any other company before it. What new ways will the company create to be even more connected? I can only dream.
All I know is, the updates to my smartphone don't come fast enough. What if I were to miss a notification?
In fact, there has to be a way to integrate Facebook and our lives even more. Why not register for classes through Facebook or Twitter? That way, it is easier to compare schedules with friends. Because who wants to be in a class without any friends? But then, why risk not having classes with friends at all?
Why can't professors record their lectures and post them to Facebook, having the class discuss it in a free-for-all web forum? There's no way to be more connected than that. It's efficient, too; everyone with their laptops in class tends to just sits on Facebook anyway, so why not cut out the middleman? The middleman being reality.
And then there's Twitter. It's like having all my friends talk to me at once. The ones who have an account, that is. Those who don't have an account can't even be considered friends anymore.
What I'm pressing for is Facebook, Twitter and all the other social networks to combine like Power Rangers to form a super social network. If that were to happen, it would be unstoppable and immune to grumpy old people who don't get the Internet and lame people who think they're too cool to poke me back on Facebook.
When that happens, and it will, the world as we all know it will change for the better. It will be the utopia our fathers and grandfathers dreamed up for us; the great social machine, a mechanism for us all to see who's tan, who's dating who and who from our graduating class just got pregnant.
All the gossip we wanted for so many years, laid out right in front of us.
