Book review, Inside Facebook
When first browsing through the chapter division I was most interested in the following chapters; Building a Site Without Tools or Controls, The Power of the Social Internet, The Internet and Global Social Networks, Facebooks Vision and maybe most of all The Future of Social Networking. Unfortunately its the chapters like You Really can Achieve anything, and How I Got In and How you Can, Too, that is setting the tone.
From a chapter named Building a Site Without Tools or Controls, you would expect some words about how to think about UI, intuitive design, usability testing, vision, target users, etc, etc. Thereon nada. This chapter is not focusing on what goal or vision they were working towards, but how the developers were supervised doing it; cool cool, fun fun, unorganized, cool cool. And no content.
It would be exiting to know something about how the increasing technology maturity among ordinary users pushes the boundaries. What is possible to do and still provide a user-friendly environment? Is eye-tracking a technique used by Facebook for measurability and usability testing?
Baloun is making a big fuzz about how much better facebook are at protecting their users integrity, compared to other social networking sites. I suppose that is in the eye of the beholder, what you will see as security and what you will see as a integrity overstep depends on if you want to be protected from corporate big brother, or gangsta little peers.
From the chapter the future of social networking, I was kind of hoping for an educated guess, from a person of Balouns former position and experience, but even though I know that nobody can be expected to predict the future, it seems to me that he is just grabbing anything out of thin air. Its OK to not have a good answer at any time, but its not like he is surprised by paparazzi s demanding a quote, he is writing a book, he had time to think about it!
My thoughts on the matter is that I think that we will se an increase in smaller, portable devices, and that it will increase the use of microblogs and other quick "on the fly" applications. I also think we are going to see a lot more scalable applications, a simple version for the mobile device, and a more complex for the home computer. There might also be some kind of peer to peer applications on the portable devices, and I suppose a further use of GPS-coordinates, sensing whenever a friends device is close by. -taking the social media further in to IRL.
In “Inside Facebook” Baloun give his readers a lot of advices in the area of how to be able to live your dream. Somehow most of the advises makes me think about the old story about a man getting hooked by the ad “send me 100 dollar and learn how to play the piano” and a week later he gets a letter in return reading “thank you for the money, now you just have to learn how to play the piano."
One advice that wasn't in the book however was is “do not hesitate to ask for advice in time when you are clueless”. The book is printed double spaced, with a sans-serif font witch makes it kind of hard to get a real flow in the reading. I wish Baloun would have asked for some advice in that matter.
Baloun really care about the environment and seem to have an honest wish to help his readers reach their personal achievements. I wish him the same, but I hope to never again read anything written by the man.
Baloun, K. (2007). Inside Facebook - Life, Work and Visions of Greatness. Oxford: Trafford Publishing.
