I guess no-one told her about the Dunbar number?

According to MSNBC's technolog, Karen Beth Young, an American woman, is currently suing Facebook after they disabled her account. She claims they did this because she started a petition page to increase the current 5000 'friend' limit. Clearly, no-one thought to tell this woman she is only capable of maintaining 150 meaningful relationships. But, do facebook friends really qualify as meaningful relationships? I went through my 203 facebook friends and counting only the ones I would say hello to if I saw them in the street, found only 44 of them made the cut. Maybe I'm just antisocial but the thought of trying to maintain 5000, or even 1000 friends is impossible, and a little frightening.

The thing is, these people aren't conventional friends. Social networking sites blur the real life barriers you put between your interactions with genuine friends, acquaintances, that guy you met once at a bar and Mahoumed Jahar(no mutual friends). Despite the insistence of facebook, all of these people are not your 'friends.' South Park had it right when they criticised the emerging 'friending' culture. Yes, I too was obligated into adding my nana as a friend. At least twitter is honest, because really a lot of them are 'followers.' They might occasionally browse your page to keep up to date with where you are and who you're with (stalkers, much?), but they're also likely to avert your eye in the street to avoid the awkward 'I know who you are but don't want to greet you' smile.

Putting the friend issue aside, the greatest thing about this story is that apparently Karen Beth Young drove from her home in Maryland to Facebook headquarters (about 3700km) to demand her account be reinstated. Now that's dedication.

Notes on the first lecture

So welcome to the class blog. Although we'll talk about the blog in more detail during the first tutorial, please don't feel you have to wait til then to start the conversation. Only the posts you select will be graded - so there's no risk in getting your toes wet straight away.

I want to begin with a follow-up to the first class yesterday. If you want to listen again to the word from Wordcamp on how to write for blogs—you know, the one that told us never to link by using "click here"—then, um, click here. It was great to hear some voices of dissent challenging this drive to streamline our language to the point of strangling it. What would be excellent is if others could share their views on what makes for good blog writing style either by replying to this post or posting anew.

Perhaps you want to relive the religiosity of the Very Reverend Steve Jobs launching the iPhone back in 2007 (sans my edits)? Thanks to Hugh for pointing out to me after the lecture that I had omitted to mention the resonances with the "Holy Trinity" (an ipod, a phone and an internet device; an ipod, a phone and an internet device; an ipod...)

The movie I showed the sequence from is Office Space (Mike Judge, 1999).

Finally, I highlighted some of the statistics in Technorati's State of the Blogosphere 2009 report. They organize their findings into Day 1, Day 2 etc. and you have to browse through these to see the kinds of stats I was pulling yesterday.

I have posted my ppt slides from the lecture on CECIL.

I'd like to encourage you to use this forum to discuss (and hopefully challenge and critique) the lectures, the readings and the debates in this class. I look forward to the conversation.