[schtinky]

When we all first joined Facebook, we were hit with an exciting torrent of old friends we'd lost touch with, especially old hookups/romances that suddenly became possible again. This was like a pathogen entering a fresh population of potential hosts.

Then, over the past 6 years, we explored all of those new possible relationships and took them to their conclusion. But now there's nothing left; like the pathogen killing off all its hosts and having nowhere else to go.

In order to survive, the population has to create new hosts faster than they're being killed i.e. Facebook would have to generate new connections for us at a faster rate than we can explore them. I don't think it comes anywhere close.

In this sense, it definitely has biological underpinnings.

[yaeger]

>In order to survive, the population has to create new hosts faster than they're being killed

I don't think that's true. Why do there need to be new connections for you to go through? What you just described is the equivalent of setting up your contacts list from scratch. Say on your phone. You get a new phone and now get to re-add all the people you know or knew. Because you want to stay in touch with them.

Once that is done, does that contact list of yours also "die out" because there is nothing new to add on a regular basis? I don't think so. You just finished building your initial contacts. And you know what happens then? You start to use it. On a regular basis. It is a tool you set up and once it is set up you use it. Simple as that. And that is the same way you can use Facebook. Once you added all the people you want to stay in contact with you can do just that.

It all boils down to how people actually use Facebook. Do they use it like a tool as I just described? Or do they merely play the game of "Who can collect the most "friends""?

I use it as a tool. I have my real friends on there. I don't have 300+ people on there just so when I post something I can marvel at the multitude of "likes" to get some kind of gratification through it. And as long as all those people continue to use Facebook I can continue to keep in touch with them this way. Even past 2017 or whatever date these people have calculated.

[schtinky]

One reason AIDS has been so successful as a pathogen is that it takes a long time to kill the host. The infection has plenty of time to spread.

Ebola, on the other hand, never spreads very far because it kills so quickly, as described above.

I wonder if we'll see a "slow-kill" social service emerge in the next few years; one that slows your roll, prevents you from blitzing through the experience all at once.