What if these likes are all but a way for us to rank the web pages for Facebook? Whereas Google uses Pagerank to do it by thousands of rack-mounted PC, Facebook just used us. We are like the people wired up to machine in the Matrix, while the candy are spoon-fed to us in the form of friend, sharing, photo posting & so on, the machine quietly aggregates our likes into the biggest human ranking machine ever built.

It is even scarier when people log in and search using this Facebook data backed search engine (let’s called it FaceIt). Imagine yourself being a geologist, your friend circle may also be in the same field and their likes will be similar to yours and therefore act as a very strong ranking mechanism for you. A search with Google may obtain popular articles, but with this FaceIt search, it will be showing results relevant to geologist such as scholarly articles.

I have been thinking about this problem for some time and thought about ways to get to it, but I have to admit that solving it by human filter is a clever way.

The Matrix is here, Neo. Good job, Mark. Sergey may not sleep well now…

1. Hot chair: when they want you to fail
2. Cold chair: when you are given nothing to do
3. Small chair: when you are given a much smaller cubicle than your title
4. Big chair: Peter’s principle, if you fail, then…
5. 3-legged chair: somewhat uncomfortable
6. Musical chair: reorg for 1 month, find a position at end of music, else…
7. Empty chair: when all your direct reports are gone
8. Wet paper mache chair: a timed exit
9. no chair: position eliminated
10. needle chair: it hurts to stay
11. merry-go-round chair: job rotation to the Nth degree
12. see-saw chair: now I see you, now I don’t

Which chair are you on now?

Accumulation of information now is less important than accumulation of human capital.

The following piece of code tells me that:

born(adam,0).
/*born(X,Year):-
begot_age(adam,Year,X).*/
born(X,Year):-
begot_age(Y,Y1,X),
born(Y,Y2),
Year is Y1+Y2.
die(X,Year):-
born(X,Y1),
die_age(X,Y2),
Year is Y1+Y2.
alive(X,Year):-
born(X,Y1),
die(X,Y2),
Year < Y2,
Year > Y1.
contemporary(X,Y):-
born(X,Y1),
born(Y,Y2),
die(X,Y3),
die(Y,Y4),
Y3 > Y2,
Y4 > Y1.

begot_age(adam,130,seth).
begot_age(seth,105,enosh).
begot_age(enosh,90,kenan).
begot_age(kenan,70,mahalalel).
begot_age(mahalalel,65,jared).
begot_age(jared,162,enoch).
begot_age(enoch,65,methuselah).
begot_age(methuselah,187,lamech).
begot_age(lamech,182,noah).
begot_age(noah,500,shem).
begot_age(noah,500,ham).
begot_age(noah,500,japtheh).

die_age(adam,930).
die_age(seth,912).
die_age(enosh,905).
die_age(kenan,910).
die_age(mahalalel,895).
die_age(jared,962).
die_age(enoch,365).
die_age(methuselah,969).
die_age(lamech,777).
die_age(noah,950).
flood(noah,600).
flood_year(Y):-
flood(noah,X),
born(noah,Y1),
Y is X+Y1.

My excuses…

The following data are from a November 2007 Rapleaf study:

“Facebook Users
63% female, 36% male
17% <18 yrs, 52% 18-25 yrs, 21% 26-35 yrs, 5% 36-45 yrs, 5% >45 yrs
MySpace Users
63% female, 36% male
20% <18 yrs, 40% 18-25 yrs, 27% 26-35 yrs, 7% 36-45 yrs, 6% >45 yrs
LinkedIn Users
38% female, 61% male
2% <18 yrs, 9% 18-25 yrs, 49% 26-35 yrs, 24% 36-45 yrs, 16% >45 yrs
Friendster Users
58% female, 41% male
12% <18 yrs, 39% 18-25 yrs, 36% 26-35 yrs, 7% 36-45 yrs, 5% >45 yrs
Plaxo Users
62% female, 37% male
16% <18 yrs, 39% 18-25 yrs, 24% 26-35 yrs, 10% 36-45 yrs, 11% >45 yrs
Hi5 Users
60% female, 39% male
21% <18 yrs, 44% 18-25 yrs, 23% 26-35 yrs, 6% 36-45 yrs, 6% >45 yrs”

It may not be the latest but it proved my point.

I rest my case, your honor.

In a nutshell: 60% of social network members are women and they have more online friends.

My wife has 29 friends now at facebook and I have only 7. Social media envy is running high in this household.

Problem with Twitter is that there is no stickiness. Things are so transient that you cannot go back to original post and edit it. Let’s Face it, FB does do a good job in putting things in context, especially for comments. With status updates and SMS also available, I am not sure what can Twitter do to counter that anymore. May be it can go below the surface and become like email protocols of yonder years. But how can money be made there if things remain so subliminal and cannot sell ads?