【挑战TIME】12期：WhyFacebookIstheFuture

文章作者 100test 发表时间 2007:12:01 14:13:36
来源 100Test.Com百考试题网

【 Introduction 】

Facebook is enjoying a tremendous popularity these days, and WHY? Here is a article from TIME that will answer your question. (In China, there are some websites like Facebook, such as 校内网 )

(This article have lots of New words)

　　　　　　Why Facebook Is the Future

On Aug. 14 a computer hacker named Virgil Griffith unleashed a clever little program onto the Internet that he dubbed WikiScanner. Its a simple application that trolls through the records of Wikipedia, the publicly editable Web-based encyclopedia, and checks on who is making changes to which entries. Sometimes its people who shouldnt be. For example, WikiScanner turned up evidence that somebody from Wal-Mart had punched up Wal-Marts Wikipedia entry. Bad retail giant.

WikiScanner is a jolly little game of Internet gotcha, but its really about something more: a growing popular irritation with the Internet in general. The Net has anarchy in its DNA. its always been about anonymity, playing with your own identity and messing with other peoples heads. The idea, such as it was, seems to have been that the Internet would free us of the burden of our public identities so we could be our true, authentic selves online. Except it turns out--who couldve seen this coming?--that our true, authentic selves arent that fantastic. The great experiment proved that some of us are wonderful and interesting but that a lot of us are hackers and pranksters and hucksters. Which is one way of explaining the extraordinary appeal of Facebook.

Facebook is, in Silicon Vall--ese, a "social network": a website for keeping track of your friends and sending them messages and sharing photos and doing all those other things that a good little Web 2.0 company is supposed to help you do. It was started by Harvard students in 2004 as a tool for meeting-- or at least discreetly ogling--other Harvard students, and it still has a reputation as a hangout for teenagers and the teenaged-at-heart. Which is ironic because Facebook is really about making the Web grow up.

Whereas Google is a brilliant technological hack, Facebook is primarily a feat of social engineering. (It wouldnt be a bad idea for Google to acquire Facebook, the way it snaffled YouTube, but its almost certainly too late in the day for that. Yahoo! offered a billion for Facebook last year and was rebuffed.) Facebooks appeal is both obvious and rather subtle. Its a website, but in a sense, its another version of the Internet itself: a Net within the Net, one thats everything the larger Net is not. Facebook is cleanly designed and has a classy, upmarket feel to it--a whiff of the Ivy League still clings. People tend to use their real names on Facebook. They also declare their sex, age, whereabouts, romantic status and institutional affiliations. Identity is not a performance or a toy on Facebook. it is a fixed and orderly fact. Nobody does anything secretly: a news feed constantly 0updates your friends on your activities. On Facebook, everybody knows youre a dog.

Maybe thats why Facebooks fastest-growing demographic consists of people 35 or older: theyre refugees from the uncouth wider Web. Every community must negotiate the imperatives of individual freedom and collective social order, and Facebook constitutes a critical rebalancing of the Internets founding vision of unfettered electronic liberty. Of course, it is possible to misbehave on Facebook--its just self-defeating. Unlike the Internet, Facebook is structured around an opt-in philosophy. people have to consent to have contact with or even see others on the network. If youre annoying folks, youll essentially cease to exist, as those you annoy 0drop you off the grid.

Facebook has taken steps this year to expand its functionality by allowing outside developers to create applications that integrate with its pages, which brings with it expanded opportunities for abuse. (No doubt Griffith is hard at work on FacebookScanner.) But it has also hung on doggedly to its core insight: that the most important function of a social network is connecting people and that its second most important function is keeping them apart.