[jcfrei]

I've noticed an interesting pattern among some people I encountered. Usually the ratio of activity on facebook (not just "sharing", but also instant messaging and status updates) is inversely proportional to their social activity in reality. Exceptions aside, it seems facebook always has been and always will be to large part a substitute for social activities/interactions in reality, which we would have liked to happen but couldn't make happen, whether it's because of social anxiety, shyness or geographical distances. people with richer social lifes need to cater to these needs less, whereas people with fewer real life social activities resort to facebook to get their fix.

[sapien]

It's especially problematic since Facebook's newsfeed algorithm seems to promote posts by exactly those who interact with me a lot on Facebook, which is correlated with living on Facebook a lot, which is (as you said) correlated with how much real life they have to talk about! Missing out on my acquaintances' big life events is one reason I've been experimenting with http://WikiSapien.com/

[jcfrei]

interesting project - is it yours (judging by your username)? and if so, how's it any different from facebook? do you put more intimate information on it and befriend less people?

[sapien]

It's different in that it's not a social network: I don't want friending, I don't want engagement, Facebook also does personal communication in a great way. I just want it to be a good source of basic information on who someone is; answer their question and get them on their way. Another difference is that (partially due to optimizing for engagement) elsewhere it is easy to find someone's most recent actions, but it's also easy to miss out on bigger long term things. I dont want it to be chronologically sorted in such an extreme way. As I say: find out who someone is, and not just what they had for lunch.