Higher Order: Google-Facebook Mashup, Anyone?

Social networking sites do provide working models of disparate interconnectedness.

The Atlantic features a smartly titled article, About Facebook–as important as Google at “ordering the web”? hmmmm. Originally launched as a campus tool to connect college students, Facebook has all but busted out for everyone now. I won’t argue its powers to order or the smorgasbord of mini applications being gobbled up for personal pages. But as far as organization of data, doesn’t any type of directory possess some mettle in the information management department?

Maybe my biggest beef with the notion is that Facebook must still inspire membership, must convince me that it’s useful in ways better than any process I have installed in my life right now. Interested parties must “buy into” the business, create a login and profile and actually provide information to order. FB’s new public search remains limited and FB members may block their profiles and information at any time. As far as I can foresee, member privatization undoes the site’s ability to access pockets of data that could potentially make it as big as Google–if it were possible.

I have to say I don’t use Facebook. I don’t use any type of social networking site, per se, and regardless of the millions of users the site may boast, there are still millions that abstain. We do, however, use search engines. So if Facebook is supposedly the next Google, I for one will not be included in any search results, as will not millions of others on a very incomplete (albeit well-ordered) planet of search. Maybe a Google-Facebook mashup?