We are all celebrities now

Like most people between 15 and 50, I share a lot online. Some, like this blog, is shared very consciously; some, like my Flickr stream, are more cumulative — one can easily create a stalker-friendly snapshot from the aggregate therein. Then there is Facebook.

Sometimes I shudder at how much of “me” is out there — a few keystrokes in the search engine of your choice will find websites, social media accounts, and many, many movie reviews all with my name (and often photo) attached. To try and control it now seems preposterous. In just a few years, the internet has made celebrities of us all — and we get a lot more than 15 minutes.

For the past couple of years I’ve really oscillated between wanting to clamp down my privacy and giving it up as already lost. This week, I’ve been pondering what, exactly, keeps me returning to Facebook?

1. Friends. Most of the friends I trade barbs with on Facebook are to be found elsewhere on the web or — amazingly enough — in real life and I think all of them would understand if I closed the doors.
2. Information. Yes, Facebook is part of my daily stream of news, opinion, and articles curated by friends and delivered by trusted sources but I can get the same info elsewhere or I can do without.
3. Games. This is almost a non-issue for me. I have only two games left that I play: Scrabble and Packrat, a game I’ve been playing for three years; I’m not far from reaching level 100 but, as with Facebook, the game keeps reinventing itself, making it more frustrating to play so that I seldom launch the app any more.
4. Marketing. Yes, I manage several pages (most collectively) but as Facebook incessantly tweaks its algorithms, fewer and fewer parts of the message get through. Would it matter if my pages went quiet?
5. Habit. In the end, this is the biggest reason. I go back because it’s part of my routine — to the point of being almost muscle memory.

Looking back over the years it’s really quite amazing just how easily Facebook has convinced a large chunk of the planet (if my math is right, a little over 10% of the globe’s total population) that it is the best single platform and the best way to manage one’s identity. Now it’s convincing businesses and marketers that they need Facebook to survive — something that has long been Google’s game.

Their primary weapon in this fight is the Open Graph Protocol — a markup language that allows any webpage to be “integrated on the social graph” — imagine it as Facebook-friendly XML; users don’t see it but Facebook does.  Mike has already integrated the current version into ThoseDeWolfes.com (he’s apparently pretty good at spotting trends); the new version (currently in developer beta) promises “deep integration” with Facebook:

After a user adds your app to their Timeline, app specific actions are shared on Facebook via the Open Graph. As your app becomes an important part of how users express themselves, these actions are more prominently displayed throughout the Facebook Timeline, News Feed, and Ticker. This enables your app to become a key part of the user’s and their friend’s experience on Facebook.

In other words, both the users and the businesses/app developers/marketers will have ever more invested in Facebook.