The World According to Facebook

This weekend, Facebook has finally proven to me that it is more than just a really smart web application and it is, in fact, a truly great contact management tool. And it all started a few weeks ago when I started to find people from elementary school on Facebook and got back in touch with friends I hadn’t seen in almost fifteen years.

All that led to a mini-reunion this past Friday night which felt almost surreal. We looked at old photos and talked about our current lives while reminiscing about other friends that hadn’t come and memories past. It was a nice feeling.

After all that, I found my best friend from second grade on Facebook; I had been trying to locate him for over fifteen years. After adding him, I realized that I had actually worked with his sister at the City of Toronto for the past seven years. Yes, I had been looking for him and all the while I was working with his sister. And it was at that point when I realized that Facebook, despite being a trendy social networking tool, could actually be used effectively as a contact management tool.

Imagine this: a connected but distributed amalgamation of alumni networks, all in contact with each other and bridged together through personal relationships. Each school (elementary school, high school, college, etc.) would manage their alumni network through the Facebook framework, and each individual alumnus would manage their own personal relationships within and outside these alumni networks. If schools were responsible for maintaining their alumni database through a service like Facbook, there would probably be fewer privacy concerns, and it would be much easier to find people — I wouldn’t have spent fifteen years looking for my long-lost friend.

Of course, not only would this require a buy-in by all schools in North America (the world?), but also would require Facebook to introduce quite a few features such as downloading contact information for importing and school admin interfaces. I mean, it probably works better the way it is now — it definitely increases serendipity — but it would be interesting if Facebook was more closely linked to learning institutions…it would definitely change the dynamic.

Alright, that’s my random ramble for the day. It’s Sunday and there’s no football on television, so don’t blame me if what I wrote doesn’t make much sense. I do that sometimes.