Sheldon Cooper Unfriending As A Master

At a certain point of the last lecture, a short discussion began, about the new terms and words brought by social media, often (improperly and/or "dangerously") applied in the real life.

That reminded me straight away of this scene from the latest episode of The Big Bang Theory...

Swiss village Obermutten has more Facebook fans than residents

The article is here.

Obermutten, a tiny swiss village, has its own page on Facebook. Anyone who "likes" that page, and so gets aware with the existence of this town, will se his/her photo put onto the Commune's official notice board.

Anybody anywhere can "become Swiss" in this way.

After only three days, the village already has fifteen times more fans than residents, and this number is growing by the day.

Thanks to social media, there are no more boundaries to go through.

What Facebook Is For

Here is a short animated video about what Facebook is for.


I find both funny and creepy the definition of Facebook as "a massively multi-player online role-playing game (funny part) whose objective is to collect "friends" (creepy part)".


Watching it made me think:


1) Will it ever be possible to think even at real life as a "multi-player role-playing game"?


2) The list of "People From The Past": if some people stopped communicating with someone on purpose (nothing in common), why having them as 'friends'? The fact that being on Facebook is the only point in common looks so sad.

Facebook, the FRA Law and Google

The legal issues surrounding the upcoming Facebook data center in Northern Sweden are starting to come up. Here's a snippet from The Register a week ago:

A controversial Swedish internet surveillance law passed in 2008 allows the government there to intercept any internet traffic that passes Sweden's borders with no need for a court warrant. It's called the FRA law and the Swedes don't like it, and Google called it "unfit for a Western democracy". And the rest of Europe could start to get annoyed by it too when that internet traffic includes their Facebook data.

What I find the most interesting in this is what Google has said and done around the issue. As you probably know they opted to build a data center in Finland. I don't know if they ever even considered Sweden but if you consider the fact that the net traffic from Finland towards Europe and onwards still goes via Sweden, it doesn't really make a difference which they choose as far as the FRA law is concerned.

I'm guessing the proximity to Russia is the real reason for choosing Hamina. The rest feels like a clever Machiavellian way to play the "Don't be evil" card to me.

An intresting article on the future direction of facebook

In the Swedish newspapers "Svenska Dagbladet" it's an interesting article on the future direction of facebook. A Swedish author and debater Per Ström has published a piece were he compares facebook to a social constitution rather than a social network. Maybe this is a good platform to start a debate on? So for all the Swedish participants read the piece and share your opinion!

I'm personally of the view that I find it rather disturbing that all this information is out there already, before I knew the consequences of my actions.

The article can be found here:

SvD - Facebook ser dig