1. “Add as acquaintance.” Or “limited friend,” which might be more acceptable. How many times have you grudgingly accepted someone you barely know, out of politeness, only to be subjected to their never-ending succession of zombie-throwings and hotness-testing in your news feed? You can set certain people so they don’t show up in your feed, but only 20 people and it’s a hassle. As well as setting friends so they can only see your limited profile, you should be able to set them so you only see limited stuff - pokes, messages and wall posts - from them.
2. Instant messaging. With Windows Live, Yahoo! and AOL still no closer to proper, easy interoperability, and IM moving more and more to the web, Facebook has a massive opportunity to enhance the user experience. A few applications have tried, but they all require both users to add the application before they can chat - a massive limitation. Built-in messaging, added by Facebook themselves, could quickly reach the critical mass needed to be useful: chat, and share files, with any friend online, live. Sounds good, doesn’t it?
3. Full mobile integration, now. Facebook’s mobile site is a joy to behold, but the real mobile killer app is text-message mailing, wall-posting, photo uploading and status-updating - the latter, in particular, to ensure Facebook can fend off the challenge from Twitter. Widely available in the US for years, text-control has finally come to the UK, but only for o2 users. Agreements with the other networks need to come fast.
4. Better real-name enforcement. Facebook’s attempts to police real identities have been controversial, but the real scandal is how little success they’ve had. Real identities are essential if Facebook is going to avoid becoming a messy hell of spammers and paedophiles like Myspace. With the advent of geographical networks millions-strong, the sense of community that made Facebook so vital in the early days has already severely eroded, but the fact that your friends’ friends all have real names and real pictures still makes it seem like a safe, sane place. But with more and more members like the several called “Sexy Man”, this is starting to break down.
5. Police applications - hard. The allowance of third-party applications, while allowing Facebook to gain new functions at a dizzying rate, has also made it a potential boon to spammers, fraudsters, and general net-nuisances. FunWall and SuperWall are particularly problematic on the spam front. I haven’t a clue how exactly they should fix it, but it’s a vital challenge.

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Album of the Year: The National, Boxer

In a year when American guitar bands continued to stand head-and-shoulders above most of their British rivals, Ohio’s The National provided a urbane, mature, and deliciously dark counterpoint to the psych-folk of artists like Spoon and Iron & Wine. Taut and fiercely intelligent, Boxer captures, instead of turning away from, the brooding anxiety that has stalked American culture in recent years. Matt Berninger’s rich voice achieves an impressive emotional impact without a shred of affectation.

Listen to “Mistaken for Strangers”

Runner-up: Jamie T, Panic Prevention

Damp squib of the year: Live Earth

Let’s face it, it always sounded a bit rum. Gigantic concerts for poverty sound illogical at first, but if they raise masses of money - or even if they influence the debate - they ultimately make sense. Gigantic concerts to stop climate change just sound wrong. Yes, if it builds awareness, it’s worth the jet flights, the lighting, the fireworks, the car journeys made by the thousands in the audience. But only a genuinely passionate, political event - at least as much so as Live8 - could have made all the excess seem justified. In the end, it was anything but. From the UK concerts being hosted by Chris Moyles - a man who probably thinks climate change is for girls - to David Gray and Damien Rice’s baffling decision to sing “Que Sera Sera”, a song that seemed to encapsulate the very complacency the concert was supposed to shake us out of - the event was vacuous and soulless from the start. Without an actually-great moment along the lines of Kanye West’s appearance at the Concert for Diana, it just felt like being stuck inside one of those green adverts full of smiling children that oil companies make.

Runner-up: Playstation 3

I-don’t-see-what-all-the-fuss-is-about phenomenon of the year: Heroes

My brother loves it. Critics like it. People who liked Lost before it got all silly like it. It’s slick mainstream sci-fi, what’s not to like? And yet, I hate it. I hate the cliched Japanese character and his absurdly wide face. I hate the uptight politician’s ludicrously square chin, the central-casting blandness of the actors playing

minor characters. The villains in Lost, as baffling as the mythology has become, remain genuinely discomforting. Malcolm McDowell spewing stock evil-genius stuff about the Survival of the Strong? The pretty, evil one eating people’s brains, for god’s sake? I just don’t get it.

Funky new web thingy of the year: Tumblr

As anyone who monitors my ever-declining rate of posts to this website can tell you, it isn’t easy finding time for regular full-length blogging. And how often do you have something really new to say, anyway? More often you just want to share something cool you’ve seen on your travels around the web. Enter Tumblr: simple, in many ways quite limiting software with one killer feature: predefined templates making it one-click simple to share audio, video or photos. The result? A lot fewer posts here, maybe, but a whole new avalanche of web-highlights shared over on my “tumblelog,” Ravindr.

Love-it-or-hate-it-you-can’t-ignore-it innovation of the year: Facebook applications

2007 was, of course, when the rest of the world finally joined me and a handful of US student friends on Facebook. No sooner had they piled in that these blasted applications came along. Suddenly I was being thrown cows and zombie-zapped by people I hadn’t seen for years. This is, obviously, rubbish. And yet, buried underneath the mile-high pile of crap that has built up since applications were allowed in the Spring, are some real gems: iLike, despite its ridiculous Apple-lite name, is great for adding songs to messages and wall posts; What I’m Listening To finally puts all that last.fm information where you need it; and apps like My Blogs, Flickr Gallery and del.icio.us let you use your profile as a hub for all your web 2.0 shreds of personality spread across the web. There are plenty more needed, instant messaging being a priority, but having hundreds of companies working on the task must be better than having just one. Now, if only someone would ask me what sort of pirate I am.

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As vaguely-out-of-touch friends do, she tracked me down on Facebook and friend-ed me. Which is all fine, and perfectly normal, and no, don’t worry, this is not yet another merits-and-drawbacks-of-Facebook discussion (it’s been around three years, people! keep up!). What made me annoyed was Mandy’s name on Facebook. Not Amanda Abigail Davis. Not even Mandy Davis. Just Mandy D. Accompanied by a non-identifiying, artsy picture.

I was genuinely irritated. Facebook is for real life, I thought to myself. Use bloody Myspace if you want to call yourself a funny codename and have a picture of Brad Pitt as your avatar. That’s why it’s populated primarily by teenage girls. Facebook works because people are real on it - real names, regular photos, bewilderingly complete contact information. It’s official, it’s trustworthy. It doesn’t purport to be a gateway to some magical other cyber-life. It’s designed to fit in with your real one. This is why, for example, you won’t find the obscure picture on the front page of this site on my Facebook profile, but one where you can actually tell what I look like.

Mandy said, after I grilled her, that she doesn’t want her identity stolen. Fair enough, though why not just hide your profile from non-friends? But really, the point isn’t just about Facebook - it’s about a wider shift in what “social networking” sites are supposed to do.

In the first few years of the internet, there was much written and said about its potential to afford people new identities and new lives. You might be a teenage girl in Iowa, but there was nothing stopping you becoming a legendary gay man on the New York club scene, a successful share trader, or a respected philosopher on UseNet. And equally, of course, you might be a 40-year old man, but you can exist as a 14-yr old girl in chat rooms - for at least as long as it takes to groom a potential sexual victim. Many of the services central to social networking services on the internet from webmail to myspace - operate on essentially this anonymous basis. There’s essentially no restriction on who you can be - as long as you can keep up the pretence.

But here’s the thing: we don’t really want wild, additional e-personalities. In many cases, we really just want to be ourselves. I’ve always been suspicious of cute e-codenames, usually going for the unexciting ravcasleygera. Increasingly, I’m seeing everyone else do the same - not just my twentysomething friends, but the teenagers who have essentially grown up with the internet too. They may have an additional, “secret” identity for particular interests - so do I - but they’ll usually have a straightforward online identity to pin their cyber-ego on.

Why? Because you only need an additional identity if you want to meet people you wouldn’t meet in ordinary life. In fact, though, we mostly want the internet to be an extension of our “real” lives. If you look at the average, e-savvy teenager’s myspace friend list, there may be 3000 people on it. But if you look at who they’re actually in regular message contact with, it’ll be friends from school. Groups services like Yahoo! Groups do exist for topics and virtual collaborations, but the vast majority are a supplement to a real-life group. Skype has conference rooms you can go into to talk to strangers; but of all the millions of people of Skype, there’s usually only a handful in them. IM, email, VOIP, even themed services like Flickr: I bet the majority of people you communicate through these mediums are your actual real-life friends. And where new friendships do blossom on the internet, they usually turn into real-life relationships - or wither. I’ve met two new people through myspace; one I went on to meet in real life, the other I fell out of contact with.

This realness - the internet as an extension of real life - is the key to Facebook’s runaway success. Facebook famously didn’t start open to the whole world, like Myspace. It started within an already very closed community - Harvard students. And it grew incrementally, through other elite US universities, all world universities, and then finally to non-students just last year.

I was at Harvard when Facebook launched. I joined on the third day, and I must have been one of the last. People pounced on it, because they saw a clear reason for it. In a closed community like a university, there are tens of people you know - maybe you took a class with them, or shared an activity like a play or sports team - who you don’t see on a regular basis - the kind of people who, if the only means of contact were in person, phone calls and emails, you could lose touch with. People like Mandy Davis, in fact. With Facebook they remain tied to you, albeit lightly, just enough to maintain contact. And it worked. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, one Harvard senior told me last year, has “had a more profound effect on college life in America than anyone in the last twenty years.” People didn’t swarm all over Facebook to escape their humdrum day-to-day, but to improve it.

It’s easy to sniff and say, if you care about someone, you’ll stay friends with them no matter what. But this ignores psychological realities. Anthropologists have noted that, as hunter-gatherers, we used to travel in tribes of 150-200 people. Then, when we settled down to agriculture, our settlements were around this size. And even now, if you take the average person, and measure the number of people in their social network - from the lady behind the counter at the dry-cleaner they chat to every week, to their friend’s brother they occasionally meet up with - you’re looking at about, you guessed it, 200 people. These relationships are significant; we don’t live in tiny villages any more, but a sense of belonging to a community - or, rather, of wanting to - is still hard-wired into us. You may only need six people to carry your coffin, but we’d all like to imagine a hundred or so people turning up to the funeral.

In a village, or a university, you might see these people in the library or greengrocer. In a city, though, you can lose them as quickly as you got to know them. The greatness of Facebook is the way it helps with that. It’s become a ritual - after you meet new people, on a night out, a trip away, or through a friend - you trak them down on Facebook. It’s a way of securing a connection that might otherwise fall by the wayside.

So, I’m not dropping my militant stance when it comes to real names - and real photos - on Facebook. Facebook is for real life in the real world. With more and more of us living in cities, and greater and greater cultural diversity, it’s becoming easier and easier to meet like-minded people. But with our ever-busier and more mobile lives, the trouble is keeping in touch with them. The great potential of the internet isn’t so much its capacity to enable new friendships and relationships. It’s to help secure existing ones.

Yours,

Ravinder Madron Casley Gera

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